"What are the chances this $2M project is going to find a revolutionary way to keep servers cool that both uses less energy and is cheaper to implement and operate?"
One of the data centres that I used to work in used passive cooling. It had a large chimney/stack at one end of the building. Waste hot air was exhausted there. This causes the air to accelerate up the stack drawing cool air into the building. It was cheaper and lower maintenance than having an active cooling system but only viable in latitudes with cool average air temperatures.
So, possible but possibly not viable for the scale required. Move all US datacentres to Canada and Alaska?
An alternative is to put DCs underwater, as Microsoft have experimented with in Scotland. The seas off the north coast of Scotland are ideal because they are cold and also because the area has plenty of power (nuclear, HEP, wind) and high bandwidth cables because of past provision for the oil and gas industry.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
