On Monday, SpaceX amended its initial public offering to state that water situations—together with water shortage, rules round water, and drought—might constrain knowledge middle growth.
It isn’t the one tech firm attempting to evaluate how water shortage may impression its enterprise. Water use is rising as one of many most contentious data center issues. A latest Gallup poll discovered that seven out of 10 People are against knowledge middle growth, with water shortage rating as the highest useful resource concern. Going through more and more fierce resistance, some tech firms are scrambling to guarantee the general public that they’re dealing with the problem head-on.
Knowledge facilities primarily use water to chill server racks, which throw off large quantities of warmth. One widespread approach, generally known as evaporative cooling, makes use of contemporary water to soak up the warmth, which is then pumped to cooling towers the place it evaporates outdoors.
Utilizing extra water can lower your expenses and cut back emissions for large tech firms by lowering the facility wanted for cooling that depends on energy-intensive pumps to recirculate water. However it may additionally include a big water footprint: Google’s facility in Council Bluffs, Iowa, as an illustration, which makes use of evaporative cooling, consumed greater than 1 billion gallons in 2024.
Lawrence Berkeley Nationwide Laboratory predicted in a 2024 report that hyperscale knowledge facilities might devour as much as 33 billion gallons of water by 2030 in the event that they relied closely on evaporative cooling. That’s on par and even lower than different thirsty industries, like agriculture or oil and fuel—a single fracked well can use 1.5 to 16 million gallons of water—however it poses a danger in areas the place water is already scarce. The chance is especially acute in summer time, when knowledge middle cooling wants are likely to skyrocket similtaneously municipal water use.
“Water is a extremely native, extremely regional challenge,” says Shaolei Ren, a professor of engineering at UC Riverside. “It is a restricted useful resource, and now we have to handle it very fastidiously.”
Some tech giants, together with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle, have made statements in latest months indicating that they’re shifting away from evaporative cooling completely with a view to save water. That features OpenAI and Oracle’s large Stargate growth in quite a few states, together with a water-stressed area of Texas.
Google is taking a special method. On Wednesday, the corporate rolled out a collection of water-related commitments to communities the place it has knowledge facilities, together with funding bulletins for water-related initiatives within the US.
They embrace pledges to replenish extra freshwater than the corporate consumes, through investments in native water initiatives; to scale up the usage of reclaimed and recycled water; and to reveal annual water use in knowledge facilities. (Different tech firms, together with Microsoft, have comparable guarantees round water replenishment and native funding. Google has been engaged on most of those pledges for just a few years.) There’s additionally a promise to make use of “a data-driven framework” to determine what knowledge middle designs would work finest with native watersheds.
Ben Townsend, the worldwide head of infrastructure and sustainability at Google, says that knowledge middle design is much more sophisticated than merely swearing off one sort of cooling in all instances. The corporate, he says, has been doing detailed hydrologic assessments of its websites for the previous 4 years to find out what sorts of cooling would work finest.
“Water is scarce in some areas and plentiful in others,” he says. “A one-size-fits-all technique simply does not work.”
In April, Google defended evaporative cooling for areas with what it referred to as “plentiful” water in a submitting to the European Union as mandatory for growing actually sustainable knowledge facilities. Google’s arguments line up with new analysis from Ren and his staff, who discovered that if all knowledge facilities within the US had been to undertake some type of evaporative cooling throughout peak demand, it might unencumber a further 10 to 30 gigawatts of energy. In areas the place grids are harassed however water assets aren’t, utilizing evaporative cooling might present a significant headroom to utilities attempting to steadiness load.
