You may be thinking about Yahoo’s approach from 2010?
> The Yahoo! approach is to avoid the capital cost and power consumption of chillers entirely by allowing the cold aisle temperatures to rise to 85F to 90F when they are unable to hold the temperature lower. They calculate they will only do this 34 hours a year which is less than 0.4% of the year.
No, what I was remembering was a building design for datacenters, but I can't find a reference. Maybe it was only conceptual. The design was to pull in cold exterior air, pass thru the dehumidifiers to bring some of the moisture levels down, and vent heat from a high rise shaft out the top. All controlled to ensure humidity didn't get wrecked.
> The Yahoo! approach is to avoid the capital cost and power consumption of chillers entirely by allowing the cold aisle temperatures to rise to 85F to 90F when they are unable to hold the temperature lower. They calculate they will only do this 34 hours a year which is less than 0.4% of the year.
https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2011/03/yahoo-compute-coop...