FT: data centers in America consuming record amounts of water
Compute like there’s no tomorrow! According to the Financial Times, US tech companies are already consuming much more precious water in their data centers than in 2019 – and the worst is yet to come.
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Compute like there’s no tomorrow! According to the Financial Times, US tech companies are already consuming much more precious water in their data centers than in 2019 – and the worst is yet to come.
The growing amounts of data created each year, combined with the pursuit of AI capabilities, are expected to put a huge strain on the world’s energy resources over the next decade, Cybernews reported in January.
Actually, never mind the next decade – the Great Energy Suck is already happening now, Financial Times, a British financial daily, says.
The news organization has collected data showing that water consumption by facilities in Virginia’s “data center alley,” – a large concentration of data centers owned by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other tech firms – has jumped by almost two-thirds since 2019.
The vast computing infrastructure in these Virginia warehouses used at least 1.85 billion US gallons of water in 2023, compared to 1.13 billion gallons in 2019.
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The trend must be similar in all of the US, says FT. Throughout the country, data centers consumed more than 75 billion gallons of water in 2023 – that’s as much as London, the capital of the United Kingdom, consumes in four months.
Environmental activists warn that this is unsustainable, and the situation could get worse because the demand for data centers will grow due to AI.
Water is, of course, used in data centers to cool computing equipment, and this is absolutely not energy-efficient, even though some firms are beginning to use reclaimed and recycled water.
For instance, Google recently touted the benefits of Generative AI but had to admit in the latest environmental report that their water consumption rose 14% in 2023, primarily due “to water cooling needs at our data centers.”
The electricity used by data centers today could power close to 6.5 million average American homes, according to sustainable investment firm Carbon Collective. Bank of America said in November that data centers are the tenth-largest water consumer in the US.