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> 3M did not make this call because they found a better product. They made it because they were staring down over 4,000 lawsuits and a $12.5 billion settlement with more than 11,000 U.S. public water systems alleging PFAS contamination in drinking water. The settlement received final court approval in March 2024. Payments stretch over 13 years.

> Who Got Hurt, Who Didn't

It seems to have had an massive impact, and article also includes a "who got hurt" but there is zero numbers about the number of people actually impacted by this catastrophe? I'm guessing the blogs focus might be on businesses, but considering this might be spawning something of a health crisis in the affected areas, maybe at least a mention of the humans involved here would make sense.

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At least where I live the PFAS disaster is so widely known and publicized that I would say it's fair to leave it out of scope for this article. Oh and "who got hurt" - basically everyone worldwide for the foreseeable future.

> At least where I live the PFAS disaster is so widely known and publicized that I would say it's fair to leave it out of scope for this article

Doesn't that kind of assume that I and everyone too also been impacted, so we should have read about it in our local news? I don't think 3M's PFAS disaster ever been mentioned in either my country's newspaper, nor my local paper, my first time reading about it here, so would be nice if the article didn't make such assumptions.

I would think, but maybe not. In the US, the story was enormously reported on, perhaps second only to the Epstein files, with a long tail that still persists now. They are also called "forever chemicals", if you've heard that term.

Many municipalities across the country were/are forced to upgrade their water filtration systems - a huge cost, possibly too little and too late. I know many other countries are taking action too, but I don't know how it compares to how the US responded.

Not to mention there was a movie about it https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/

> They are also called "forever chemicals", if you've heard that term.

Yes, of course I've heard about PFAS before, but not that data centers were polluting public water systems with PFAS, did you mean earlier that you've read stories about PFAS in general in your papers? That'd put your previous comment in another light, I thought you specifically talking about the "more than 11,000 U.S. public water systems alleging PFAS contamination" part, not PFAS' in general.

I'm not the commenter you originally replied to. Regardless, I think you might have misinterpreted the article:

3M is a huge manufacturer in material sciences, probably best known for adhesives/tape.

They were one of the high-profile sources of PFAS (Dupont is another that springs to mind).

The affected population is global. The "11,000 U.S. public water systems alleging PFAS contamination" is part of that global impact, not something related to datacenters.

They moved away from PFAS due to the lawsuits.

The topic of this article is: One of the things 3M stopped producing was a large piece of the supply chain for the fluid cooling process in datacenters.

> not something related to datacenters.

Did you read the submission article? Seems they tried to use it for cooling data centers and were running a bunch of experiments, one example:

> Intel ran proof-of-concept data center cooling with Novec 649. The technology worked beautifully. The chemistry underneath it was poisoning groundwater.

I'm just chiming in with the best of intentions to say that I also think you're misinterpreting some things in a way that would be much more effort to explain than you simply reading the article again with this in mind.

I did read the article. Just FYI, from the HN rules:

"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article."

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