In response to questions on its two-phase cooling merchandise from WIRED, together with whether or not or not the corporate deliberate to submit chemical substances for fast-tracked consideration beneath the administration’s new knowledge middle exemption, Chemours spokesperson Cassie Olszewski stated the corporate is “within the strategy of commercializing our two-phase immersion cooling fluid, which would require related regulatory approvals.”
“Our work on this space has been targeted on creating extra sustainable and environment friendly cooling options that might permit knowledge facilities to eat much less power, water, and footprint whereas successfully managing the rising quantity of warmth generated by the following era of chips with larger processing energy,” Olszewski stated.
These chips is also a major supply of recent chemical substances. Each Schweer and Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, a lawyer at environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, say that the semiconductor trade, which produces the chips that present the computing energy in knowledge facilities, stands to realize considerably from the expedited evaluate course of. The semiconductor manufacturing course of makes use of without end chemical substances at a number of totally different factors of manufacturing, together with within the essential photolithography course of, which makes use of gentle to switch patterns to the floor of silicon wafers.
Schweer says that in his previous couple of years working on the EPA, this trade submitted numerous functions for brand new chemical substances. Kalmuss-Katz says that semiconductor producers “are a major driver of recent chemical substances.”
“The administration has this sort of AI-at-all-costs mindset, the place you’re speeding to construct an increasing number of knowledge facilities and chip fabs with none significant plan for coping with their local weather impacts, their pure useful resource impacts, and the poisonous substances which might be getting used and launched from these new services,” he says.
Lobbying paperwork present that the semiconductor trade has been asking for modifications this 12 months to the EPA’s new-chemicals program. In March, Nancy Beck, a former coverage director for an trade lobbyist group who now leads the Workplace of Chemical Security and Air pollution Prevention, the workplace that oversees new chemical opinions, met with representatives from SEMI, a world advocacy group for the trade. The assembly was initially organized to debate the “EPA’s method to rules on PFAS and different chemical substances which might be important to semiconductor manufacturing,” in keeping with emails obtained by WIRED by way of a Freedom of Data Act request. Emails present that Beck steered in the course of the assembly that the lobbying group observe up with a public remark in help of modifications to the brand new chemical substances program, which the group despatched over the following month in a letter. (“The Trump EPA encourages stakeholders to submit and doc their feedback on proposed guidelines in order that we get a various array of views,” says Hirsch, the EPA spokesperson.)
