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.