The tech industry has been bragging about its water-free datacenter cooling systems for years. Turns out the reason those systems don't use water is because they use something significantly worse: a brand new 'forever chemical' that a Trump executive order is now pushing the EPA to approve at speed, before anyone has properly figured out if it will poison people.
The Bait-and-Switch Hidden in Plain Sight
Here's the pitch Big Tech has been running: datacenters use a lot of water, communities hate that, so we built two-phase cooling systems instead. Google and others have touted these as the responsible alternative. Clean, efficient, no giant water bills.
What they left out of the brochure is that two-phase cooling systems use PFAS gas as a refrigerant. PFAS, if you've somehow missed the last decade of environmental news, are the class of roughly 16,000 synthetic compounds known as 'forever chemicals' because they do not break down in nature, accumulate in the human body, and are linked to cancer, liver disease, kidney damage, birth defects, high cholesterol, and compromised immune systems. The Guardian reported on this story Sunday.
'The datacenter industry knows it is under fire for its enormous use of water so they cast themselves as the good guys by using alternative cooling, but they're not telling the public that they're using hazardous chemicals,' said Lenny Siegel, director of Chips Communities United, a nonprofit focused on PFAS pollution. 'Some are toxic, some are greenhouse gases and some are both.'
Meet Opteon 2P50, the Chemical Nobody Asked For
The specific compound at issue is called Opteon 2P50, made by chemical giant Chemours. The company has filed an application with the EPA to get this thing approved for use in datacenter cooling systems, and it is also the first chemical for which any industry has asked the Trump EPA to invoke a fast-track review process under one of the president's executive orders.
That executive order calls for expedited review of chemicals used in datacenters. The Guardian describes it as 'legally dubious,' and the nonprofit legal group Earthjustice, which led the formal comments opposing approval, agrees. Seventeen environmental organizations signed onto those comments, accusing Chemours of submitting bad science to minimize the chemical's apparent risks.
The comments allege a parade of scientific problems: Chemours relied on a strain of lab rat that is less sensitive to PFAS toxicity than humans are, submitted incomplete toxicological data, and based its worker safety exposure limits on standards developed by an industry-linked science group called Tera, which according to Earthjustice has a documented history of producing industry-friendly research and attacking chemical regulations.
The TFA Escape Hatch That Doesn't Actually Work
The industry's main argument that this particular PFAS isn't dangerous rests on what happens after it leaks into the air. When F-gas escapes from datacenter systems, it often converts into a compound called TFA. The industry's position is essentially: don't worry about it, TFA is fine.
There are two problems with that argument. The first is that TFA is considered a PFAS in most countries, just not by the US EPA, which is a regulatory distinction that does not reflect a physical reality. The second is that recent research has found TFA is more toxic than scientists previously believed. The European Chemicals Agency classified it as hazardous this month, finding it probably disrupts thyroid function, reduces sperm quality, and damages the liver. The Trump EPA has not updated its classification.
Chemours, for its part, told The Guardian that the two-phase systems are 'closed loop' and that emissions are low. The company accused the environmental groups of making 'sweeping generalizations' about PFAS as a class. That would be a more convincing defense if Chemours itself didn't have what The Guardian describes as 'a history of releasing dangerous levels of pollution into communities around its plants.'
What 'Fast-Track' Means When the Trump EPA Is Doing the Tracking
The legal core of this fight is what Trump's executive order actually requires the EPA to do. The order calls for prioritizing datacenter chemicals in review. Earthjustice's reading is that priority review means a faster timeline, not a guarantee of approval. The EPA is still bound by the Toxic Substances Control Act, which requires the agency to assess health risk regardless of what a president's executive order says about an industry's preferences.
'We're worried that the EPA may interpret priority review as priority approval, and we need to remind them that the executive order has no bearing on assessing health risk,' said Adriana Antezana, a scientist with Earthjustice.
If the EPA waves Opteon 2P50 through anyway, Earthjustice has signaled it is prepared to sue. There is also a downstream risk the groups flagged: approval for datacenter cooling doesn't stay contained to datacenters. Once a chemical clears the new chemicals review, it becomes considerably easier to approve it for other industrial uses or consumer products like refrigerators. The specific approval Chemours is chasing could become a template.
The Contamination Problem Already Baked In
The environmental groups' comments make a point that gets lost in the back-and-forth about Opteon 2P50's specific toxicity profile: the baseline is already bad. US drinking water is already extensively contaminated with PFAS from decades of industrial use. For many Americans living near chemical plants or military bases, PFAS exposure is not a theoretical future risk; it is the current reality.
Approving a new forever chemical for mass deployment in datacenters that are being built across the country at an unprecedented pace adds new contamination risk on top of existing high exposures. That cumulative burden is exactly the kind of 'unreasonable risk' that toxic chemical laws are supposed to prevent the EPA from ignoring.
Chemours did not respond to The Guardian's request for comment on the substance of the formal objections.
The Dingo Take
Let's recap the situation. The tech industry spent years getting credit for supposedly greening up its datacenter operations by ditching water cooling. The actual swap was water for a brand new PFAS compound whose full health profile is not yet established, made by a company with a history of contaminating communities, being pushed through a regulatory process by a presidential executive order that legal experts think is on shaky constitutional ground, before a EPA that has shown zero inclination to slow-walk anything that benefits a major industry under this administration. That is not a green solution. That is a marketing solution.
The 'closed loop' defense Chemours is offering would carry more weight if closed loops never leaked. They do. That's why there's an entire technical category called 'fugitive emissions.' And when this particular gas leaks, it may become TFA, which Europe just classified as hazardous while the US EPA still doesn't count it as a PFAS. American regulatory exceptionalism has rarely been deployed for dumber reasons.
Earthjustice is right to put the EPA on notice now, before approval, because the post-approval lawsuit is a worse outcome for everyone except the lawyers. The Trump administration is trying to use datacenter buildout as a reason to shortcut chemical safety review. If that works here, the precedent doesn't stop at datacenters. Every industry with a sympathetic story and a lobbyist will be standing in line with the same ask. The forever chemicals are already everywhere. We don't have to make more of them.
