Just posting here as an interesting article. I was aware cooling data centres was a problem but I didn’t realise just how much water some of them use to do it!
What lies ahead for the data center industry in 2023? It will be a year of dueling cross currents that could constrain or accelerate business activity in the sector. Here are ...
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One of the major tensions in data center development is the large amount of water used to cool some data centers. Extreme heat and drought are raising the bar for fast-growing cloud computing platforms and data center developers.
“In just a few years half of the world’s population is projected to live in water-stressed areas, so to ensure all people have access to water, we all need to innovate new ways to help conserve and reuse this precious resource," said Adam Selipsky, the CEO of Amazon Web Services.
In many regions, data centers are now using air-cooled chillers that recirculate water in a closed loop, drastically reducing their water use. But in other regions, they continue to rely on evaporative cooling systems that are highly efficient, but require lots of water.
Major cloud platforms are making pledges to be water positive, and are beginning to disclose more information about their water use. This is progress, but is also a response to public pressure and lawsuits seeking information about community water impact. After years of saying its water use in some markets was a trade secret, Google recently
shared data on its water usage, revealing that its data center fleet uses 4.3 billion gallons of water in 2021, which works out to an average daily water footprint of 450,000 gallons per data center.
That's a huge number, and Google sought to place it in the context of the business activity created by its services, noting that it's equivalent to the water used for 29 golf courses (context: there are more than 11,000 golf courses in the United States).
The Google data also illustrated how water use varies widely based on regional climates and cooling designs. The Google cloud campus in Iowa used more than 1 billion gallons of water in 2021, while a smaller campus in Atlanta had a net impact of 13 million gallons.
"The best approach depends on local factors — there is no one-size-fits-all solution," said Urs Holzle, the Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure at Google, in a
blog post. "In many places, water is the most efficient means of cooling. When used responsibly, water cooling can play an important role in reducing emissions and mitigating climate change. Water-cooled data centers use about 10% less energy and thus emit roughly 10% less carbon emissions than many air-cooled data centers. In 2021, water cooling helped us reduce the energy-related carbon footprint of our data center portfolio by roughly 300,000 tons of CO2."
Yes, water usage is complicated. But as more areas face drought and water scarcity (like the
Colorado Basin), data centers will face growing pressure to reduce their water impact. The sector has a proven ability to conserve resources through innovation and operational discipline, as seen in its
extraordinary success in energy efficiency, which yielded $60 billion in savings as the industry's electricity use rose just 4 percent between 2010 and 2020, a decade of exponential growth in computing power.
The energy efficiency revolution was a response to public pressure and fears of regulation. Expect to see a similar wave of innovation in addressing water conservation in coming years, starting in 2023.
