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Equation 6 · Part 4 · AI Datacenter Power and Cooling: A First-Principles Introduction

Denominator: IT Equipment Energy

WUE=Annual Site Water UsageIT Equipment Energy,\mathrm{WUE} = \frac{\text{Annual Site Water Usage}}{\text{IT Equipment Energy}},
IT Equipment Energy\text{IT Equipment Energy}

What this part means

The complete quantity below the fraction bar; it must be nonzero for this division.

Its job in the formula

IT Equipment Energy occurs below the fraction bar. The quantity above the bar is divided by this expression; zero is excluded as a denominator.

The passage around this formula

Water usage effectiveness fills that second gap, introduced by the same organization a few years before this decade’s AI buildout made it urgent: WUE=Annual Site Water UsageIT Equipment Energy\mathrm{WUE} = \frac{\text{Annual Site Water Usage}}{\text{IT Equipment Energy}}. reported in litres per kilowatt-hour and deliberately built to use “the same value… as the denominator for this new metric” as PUE, “to both ensure the metrics stay linked and speed their adoption” [ 6 ] . WUE exists because the cheapest way to reject a given amount of heat is very often evaporative — cooling towers and adiabatic assistance work against the wet-bulb temperature rather than the dry-bulb temperature, so they can reach a lower effective cooling temperature for less fan and compressor energy than a fully dry system…

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Learn the underlying idea

A fraction a/b means a divided by b. The top number is the numerator; the bottom number is the denominator, and it cannot be zero.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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