The company responsible for one of the country's worst PFAS contamination cases has a new plan. It wants to sell a fluorinated chemical for AI data centers. It won't share the data behind its safety claims.
Chemours is developing Opteon 2P50, a fluorinated fluid for two-phase immersion cooling. Servers sit submerged in liquid that boils off heat and condenses back for reuse. The chemical is still awaiting EPA approval.
The Company Behind Both the Problem and a Proposed Fix
Chemours and predecessor DuPont released PFAS from their Fayetteville Works facility into the Cape Fear River and air for decades. That contaminated drinking water for hundreds of thousands of North Carolina residents.
A 2019 consent order now requires Chemours to provide safe drinking water to affected residents and reduce emissions. The company says it has spent more than $400 million on emissions reduction and about $160 million on private well testing.
Chemours says 2P50 won't be manufactured at Fayetteville Works, and has no plans to change that. The company argues PFAS shouldn't be judged as a single class, since individual chemicals carry different properties and risks.
What Chemours Wouldn't Share
Chemours told WRAL it provided the EPA "extensive technical and scientific information" about 2P50. WRAL requested that same data directly, including full-scale testing results and emissions information. The company didn't provide it after more than a week of correspondence.
Chemours has publicly claimed since 2023 that 2P50 could cut cooling energy use by more than 90%. It also claims the fluid could nearly eliminate water use. It didn't share the underlying data behind either figure when asked.
A coalition of 17 environmental groups is urging the EPA not to approve 2P50 or other new PFAS uses. NRDC and Earthjustice are among them.
"There's no real closed-loop system when it comes to PFAS," said Drew Ball, NRDC's Southeast campaigns director.
Not Every Company Is Taking This Path
Amazon and Microsoft are both building data centers in North Carolina without immersion cooling. Amazon plans to cool its Richmond County facilities with outside air roughly 93% of the year. It will switch to evaporative cooling only on the hottest days.
Microsoft says it doesn't add PFAS chemicals to its cooling operations at all. Its Person County project uses air-cooled chillers and a closed, recirculating water loop with no added chemicals.
North Carolina's own oversight hasn't kept pace with any of this. State regulators couldn't tell WRAL whether developers must disclose all cooling chemicals used. They also couldn't say how they'd detect a fluorinated chemical not already subject to monitoring.
A bill requiring closed-loop cooling at certain facilities passed the state House in June. It stalled in the Senate.
"We don't even have a handle on what type of pollution is coming out of these systems right now," Ball said.
What This Means for Miami
This adds a genuinely new dimension to the water concerns MAIN has already tracked across Florida's data center pipeline. That includes SWFWMD's permit fights over Fort Meade and the water-use estimates cited for Miami-Dade's newest projects.
Those fights have mostly centered on water volume. This story is about chemical composition instead. That's a distinct risk. Regulators in any state, including Florida, may not yet require the disclosures needed to catch it. A contaminated water supply could go unnoticed.
Perplexity's New On-Device AI Raises Real Enterprise Security Questions