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Huge disclaimer that I'm not an expert on this, but:

Googling suggests that you're trading off electricity used to cool the data center with electricity used to blow the air over the electronics, and that ~25C is the temperature where the sum of those is minimized:

https://i.dell.com/sites/content/business/solutions/whitepap...

On Oxide and Friends (a podcast by a startup building servers) they claims their choice to use larger quieter fans reduces the power consumption of the fans from ~20-30% of the power a rack consumes to ~2%. Which might suggest that that ~25C number is actually a result of poor hardware choices for moving air more than anything else.

https://youtu.be/xNLxknaj72g?si=TWdQnHIRq_BsOOXi&t=3301




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