“There’s also liquid immersion cooling, where you submerge the equipment in some kind of non-conducting liquid,” he added. “That has challenges, too. It’s newer. It’s more expensive, and it has maintenance issues because you can’t upgrade the equipment while it’s submerged.”
AI Impact on Data Center Water Demand
But scarcity is just one point of concern, he added. “If the data center uses air-side economizers and the outside ambient air is entering the data center, the water is treated for minerals or hard water, and bacteria treatment, as it will be inhaled by employees,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Wes Swenson, a founder, investor, and CEO of Novva Data Centers, a privately-held data center company based in West Jordan, Utah explained that if water is a finite resource in any given area, and data centers enter the community, and they use water for evaporative chilling, then they can increase the pressure on water inventory.
Simmons pointed out that water-free systems have been around for years. “The argument against them is that they use more energy to run the systems than water systems, which is a myth,” he said.
In 2022, Google reported, the total water consumption by its data centers and offices was 5.6 billion gallons — the equivalent of what it takes to irrigate 37 golf courses annually, on average, in the southwestern United States. Google was careful to note, however, wherever feasible, it tries to use non-potable sources of freshwater and alternatives to freshwater
In addition, it explained that it also evaluates and takes into account local water stress when deciding where to locate its facilities, how to design them, and how to operate them — from water systems in its offices to cooling systems in its data centers.
If Google’s and everyone else’s data centers are thirsty for water now, that thirst could worsen as the demand to run artificial intelligence models increases. “AI will increase the demand for water by data centers significantly,” maintained Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst at the Enderle Group, an advisory services firm in Bend, Ore.
“There are alternatives. They just require us to use more energy,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Cooling Alternatives
“Water that is not lost to evaporation is flushed into the city’s wastewater system, where it must either be retreated or shifted to irrigation uses,” he continued. “It takes massive energy use to clean it and reclean it.”
Although data centers primarily use water for cooling, they can also use air cooling as an alternative, noted Adam Simmons, a content provider for Data Center Knowledge, an online source of information on the data center industry.
“That’s why, in 2022, 82% of our freshwater withdrawals came from regions with low water stress,” it added.
For the sixth year in a row, the company matched 100% of its annual global electricity use with renewable energy purchases, according to the 104-page report.
Amazon Web Services also considers water stress levels when locating its data centers. “In certain places, we might look at the community and decide it’s not the right thing for us to use water to cool our data centers,” explained AWS Global Lead for Water Will Hewes.
“Amazon had a program in Oregon where they were putting water they had been using for cooling and putting it into irrigation canals and calling that mitigation,” he told TechNewsWorld. “But that does nothing for the sources of that water — a river, stream, or aquifer.”
John DeVoe, a senior fundraiser and advisor of WaterWatch of Oregon, a water quality monitoring organization in Portland, Ore., cautioned that corporate promises about water usage have to be carefully scrutinized.
“There’s no water going back to those sources,” he continued, “and even if it did, it would kill the fish living there.”
“Our goal is even with water growth, we will have a net positive impact,” he observed.
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