One of the consequences of the AI boom is that cooling servers has become a serious engineering challenge.

The more powerful the AI hardware becomes, the more heat it generates during operation. And at a certain point, simply blowing more air through a server rack stops being a particularly efficient method of cooling.

That’s why when I visited Meta’s AI Infrastructure in Texas, one of the technologies I was most interested in wasn’t actually the AI hardware. It was the plumbing.

The Cooling Shift

Traditional data centers, that’s data centers used for compute tasks such as searching for your favorite creator on Instagram or liking a post on Facebook, will more often than not use air cooling to keep the hardware at an optimal temperature. 

Even a few years ago, using air cooling methods to cool AI hardware was an achievable solution. In fact, I visited a data center in Altoona, Iowa, where racks of 16 Nvidia H100s were kept cool completely through air cooling with minimal water usage. Minimal amounts of water were used at the start of the data center cooling process to cool the air during warmer months, but no water was ever being sent directly to the hardware.

It’s only more recently that newer AI hardware designs have created the demand for a newer, more optimal method of cooling.

Enter closed-loop liquid cooling.

There’s a common misconception that AI data centers are automatically big water users. The reality depends on the cooling design — Meta’s data centers use a closed-loop system that recirculates water in a sealed loop, using very little on an ongoing basis.

The majority of Meta’s newest AI-optimized data centers use closed-looped, liquid cooling as it is the most efficient way to cool GPU servers — both from a resources point of view, but also from an infrastructure point of view.

What Is Closed-Loop Cooling?

The basic idea behind closed-loop liquid cooling is actually pretty simple.

A liquid coolant (a mix of water and glycol) is passed through the server hardware to move heat away from the server racks. But instead of that liquid being expelled from the facility, it is pumped through a series of heat exchangers, which are used to dissipate and transfer the heat away from the liquid. Once the liquid has cooled down, it is sent back around to the server racks in a continuous looping process.

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So the same water and glycol mixture is being used over and over again to keep these chips cool. In fact, Meta expects to use these coolants for up to a decade without needing to replace them. 

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The heat transfer methods can vary depending on the location and environment the data center is in. When Meta needs to place liquid-cooled equipment into facilities that do not have the liquid cooling infrastructure built into the buildings, they utilize a system called Air-Assisted Liquid Cooling. This consists of racks that contain pumps and heat exchangers that essentially act similar to the large building system described above, with the same closed-loop cooling just on a smaller, more distributed scale. 

Why is closed-loop liquid cooling the most ideal method? Because it’s resource efficient. In fact, a typical AI-optimised data center using a closed-loop liquid cooling system with dry coolers uses less water annually than a couple of full-service restaurants. When you compare water usage to real use cases, as opposed to numbers, suddenly the low usage is actually really impressive.

Optimizing for Efficiency

This innovative liquid cooling system isn’t just about saving water, it’s also a much more efficient use of the space inside of the racks and data centers. If you were to attempt to cool these same servers with air, you’d likely need nearly double the size of the server tray in order to add in the required air cooling equipment. That means you have a much bigger tray, but still the same compute capacity, and eventually, you’d reach diminishing returns with larger and larger air-cooled solutions.

With direct-to-chip closed-loop liquid cooling, the engineers can fit many more GPUs in the same sized server rack, resulting in fewer racks required. So a facility of the same size is now able to scale its capacity without needing to take up more space.

Meta’s Open-Source Liquid Cooling Infrastructure

If you’ve seen any of my video content on Meta’s infrastructure, you’ll know that they design and develop their own systems across their entire infrastructure stack, all the way from designing their own chips to the cooling systems and power infrastructure.

So what do they do with these designs once they’ve deployed them?

Consistent with Meta’s Open Compute Project legacy, these advances are being shared with the industry. The Open Compute Project (founded 2011) is an open-source hardware and software initiative that aims to make data center infrastructure more efficient, scalable, and sustainable. In 2025, Meta announced IcePack, a liquid-cooled network rack platform that’s being shared openly for free via the Open Compute Project.

Using AI to Optimize Data Center Cooling

The Meta Engineering teams are doing a great job of finding the optimal cooling methods for their data centers. But there’s another interesting part to this story: they’re also using reinforcement learning to help optimize their cooling infrastructure. 

As we found out in this short article, cooling a data center isn’t as simple as choosing a temperature and leaving the system running. Conditions change. The environment changes depending on the location of the data center. The amount of work the servers are doing changes, and so does the amount of cooling. Therefore, the cooling infrastructure has to be purpose built, flexible, and deployed to address these specific considerations across every location.

So Meta’s engineering team has been experimenting with reinforcement learning to help inform the design and operations of their cooling systems. This reinforcement learning-based approach has since been scaled to the air-cooled data centers in Meta’s fleet.

Rather than experimenting directly on a live data center, where getting that decision wrong could potentially cause issues with operations, Meta’s engineers built a physics-based simulator of a data center environment.

The simulator can model variables such as weather conditions, server load, and the behavior of the cooling equipment. This gives the reinforcement learning model a safe environment in which to test different decisions to learn how to reduce the amount of cooling that is required while still keeping the servers within their optimal operating conditions.

And just to be clear, while this started as an experiment, it isn’t one anymore.

In a pilot at one of Meta’s data centers, this reinforcement learning-based approach reduced the amount of energy consumed by the air cooling supply fans by an average of 20% while also reducing water usage by 4% across different weather conditions.

Those aren’t insignificant numbers, and when you apply those reductions across an entire data center fleet, that’s a really impressive efficiency gain that doesn’t go unnoticed.

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We are announcing an agreement we have reached with a bipartisan group of 52 attorneys general across US states, territories, and the District of Columbia, building on our longstanding efforts to empower parents and support teens.

Through this agreement, we have set out a path toward industry-wide commitments to further empower parents by introducing:

• A two-hour daily time limit
• Turning off access to our apps at night as a default
• No notifications during school hours
• Clear prompts and notifications to teens every 15 minutes of continuous screen time
• New parental supervision controls, so parents can decide how their teens use our apps

We want to ensure teens benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone. These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers — TikTok and YouTube — to put the same measures in place. 

All platforms should empower parents and support teens in these ways because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another. For meaningful progress to happen, we urge our peers to join us.

The post An Open Letter to TikTok and YouTube to Join Us in Supporting Teens appeared first on Meta Newsroom.

Our Agreement With US State Attorneys General

Today, we are announcing an agreement with a bipartisan group of 52 attorneys general across US states, territories, and the District of Columbia, building on our longstanding efforts to empower parents and support teens.

Over the years, we have consistently partnered with parents and experts — listening, learning, and building. That’s why we launched Teen Accounts in 2024, to bring automatic protections to teens, and more control for parents. 

Ensuring teens have a safe and productive experience on our platforms is an absolute imperative for Meta. We want to get this right for parents and teens, and that’s why we partnered with state attorneys general to set a new industry standard.

Calling on TikTok and YouTube to Join Us

While this is an important step, the fact is that teens move fluidly between dozens of apps a day. All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another. 

For meaningful progress to happen, we urge TikTok and YouTube to join us and state attorneys general in adopting this new standard, to ensure teens use social media in a healthy and responsible way.

New Protections for Teens and Stronger Controls for Parents

Pending judicial approval, in participating US states and territories, these protections and controls will automatically apply to under-18s on Instagram and Facebook. The majority of the terms are required to remain in place for 10 years.

• Time Limit: A default two-hour daily time limit that teens can only turn off with a parent’s permission. This limit is cumulative across Facebook and Instagram, and time spent scrolling on both apps counts toward the total, including if we detect that someone has multiple accounts. 
• Night Mode: A default block from our apps between midnight and 6am. This means teens will not be able to post or view their Feed, Stories, Explore, or Reels, for example. 

• School Mode: Notifications will be muted by default between 8 AM and 3 PM. During those hours, teens will no longer receive push notifications, except for direct messages and alerts about their account security or safety.

• Regular Prompts: Teens will receive prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous screen time on Facebook or Instagram. They’ll also receive prompts when their total daily usage hits 60 minutes and 90 minutes. These prompts are designed to encourage intentional use. 

• Algorithmic Feed Control: Teens will be able to choose a non-algorithmic feed — one that isn’t personalized by our recommendation systems — as their default. We will periodically remind them of this option, and parents can choose to adjust their teen’s default experience to require this setting.
• Autoplay Control: Teens will be able to turn off autoplay, so that content no longer automatically plays. Instead, they’ll need to take a deliberate action, like a tap or swipe, to see more. Parents can choose to adjust their teen’s default experience to require this setting.
• Hidden Likes: Teens won’t see the number of likes and reactions on posts — both their own and those from others — by default.
• Disabling cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup filters: In addition to our existing policy to block teens from using cosmetic surgery filters, we’ll now block teens from using extreme makeup filters.
• Age Assurance: We work hard to find and remove underage accounts from our apps and, as part of our agreement, we’re investing in even stronger technology to proactively catch accounts that may belong to under-13s. We’re also strengthening the technology we use to identify accounts that may be between the ages of 13 and 17, so we can ensure those accounts are placed in experiences designed for teens, even if they give us an adult birthday. However, to ensure teens are consistently protected across the many apps they use, app stores must provide developers with verified age information. This will allow platforms to put age-appropriate protections in place for as many teens as possible. That’s why we’ll continue to advocate for legislation that empowers parents by requiring app stores to verify age and obtain parental approval before a teen downloads an app.
• Age-appropriate content restrictions: We will maintain our current content standards so that, by default, teens are placed into 13+ content settings, inspired by movie ratings criteria and parent feedback. We will also continue to prevent teens from following or interacting with accounts we consider age-inappropriate. We will work to continually improve these systems to ensure age-appropriate content experiences for teens.
• Unwanted contact from strangers: We will maintain our current practices of defaulting teens into private accounts on Instagram and private default settings on Facebook, and we’ll continue to restrict potentially suspicious adults from contacting them. We will also strengthen our efforts to make it harder for those adults to find, follow, or interact with teens.
• Reporting and ongoing protection from harmful content: We will continue to give teens easy ways to report content that concerns them, and we’ll work to improve our response times. We will also continue our work to protect teens from potentially harmful experiences by regularly evaluating how often teens are exposed to them. We’ll draw on research and expert input to improve our work.
• Strengthening our parental controls: We will encourage parents to set up our supervision tools and give them new controls and insights. This includes notifying parents when a teen links a secondary account, alerting them to interactions with potentially suspicious accounts, and providing periodic updates on their teen’s usage and any changes their teen attempts to make to their protective settings.
• Our direct messaging features are excluded from Night Mode, Time Limit, and School Mode restrictions, to allow teens to stay connected with friends and family.

Financial Details

The agreement includes a payment of approximately $18 billion, which can be used to fund youth online safety initiatives, among other state priorities. The payment will be distributed in annual installments over a 10-year period. Participating states will receive approximately 70% (approximately $12.7 billion) of the allocated payment over the decade. The remaining 30% (approximately $5.3 billion) will be released only after two specific conditions are met. 

1. YouTube and TikTok implement a one-hour Daily Limit, Night Mode, and age assurance measures. 
2. YouTube and TikTok each pay an amount matching the 30% figure, with half of the remaining funds tied to YouTube’s payment and half tied to TikTok’s.  

We expect to accrue a legal expense of approximately $10 billion in Q3’26 related to the agreement. This charge was not contemplated in the expense range that was provided in the Q2 earnings call. Otherwise, the guidance ranges provided in our July earnings release remain unchanged.

Encouraging Industry-Wide Adoption

The agreement is designed to drive industry-wide adoption, ensuring teens receive consistent protections across the apps they use most, like YouTube and TikTok. If industry peers adopt this new standard, certain provisions will be strengthened. 

The majority of the terms are required to remain in place for 10 years, but our Time Limit and Night Mode features will start with a five-year commitment. However, if industry peers sign on to the agreement, it will both extend this commitment to 10 years and prompt stronger default limits — reducing the Daily Limit to one hour per app and expanding Night Mode hours to 10:00 PM–7:00 AM (up from midnight–6:00 AM).

Additional Research and Oversight

The agreement will also establish an independent social media research foundation. Meta will share consented user data with the foundation to advance independent research into teen well-being and grow our collective understanding of how to best support teens online.

Finally, an independent auditor will test and report to the states on Meta’s compliance with the agreement, reviewing Meta’s compliance with its terms annually for five years.

On the agreement, C.J. Mahoney, Chief Legal Officer at Meta, said:
“I’m pleased to announce that Meta has reached an agreement with a bipartisan group of state attorneys general from around the country on a new set of rules governing teens’ use of social media. The framework we’ve negotiated will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms. Our new Time Limit commitments, Night Mode features and usage limits during school hours set the right path forward for our whole industry, but this framework will only work if all our peers join us. Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution. We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away. As a parent, I’m proud of both the work Meta has done to protect kids historically, and of this new groundbreaking agreement. But its success depends on all other social media platforms following Meta’s lead.”

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We’re pleased to launch these new protections, and we’ll continue to work with parents, policymakers, and regulators around the world to further our shared goal of supporting teens and empowering parents online.

A bipartisan group of 52 attorneys general across US states, territories, and the District of Columbia have joined this multistate agreement:

Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia,Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, N. Mariana Islands, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. 

This post contains forward-looking statements, including about Meta’s business outlook. You should not rely on these statements as predictions of future events. Additional information regarding potential risks and uncertainties about our business and financial results can be found in our most recent Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Meta undertakes no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events.

The post Our Agreement With Bipartisan Attorneys General: Calling on TikTok and YouTube to Join Us in Supporting Teens appeared first on Meta Newsroom.