The AI boom is driving demand for data centers, thereby driving up water consumption. (Water is used to chill the pc equipment in data centers.) After According to the FT, in Virginia – home to the world's largest concentration of knowledge centers – water consumption increased by nearly two-thirds between 2019 and 2023, from 1.13 billion gallons to 1.85 billion gallons.
Many say the worldwide trend is unsustainable. Microsoft, a serious data center operator, says 42% of the water it utilized in 2023 got here from “water-stressed areas.” Google, which is considered one of the biggest data center operators, said this yr that 15% of its freshwater withdrawals got here from “highly water-stressed” areas.
Why can't data centers recycle their water in a closed loop system? Many do, but much of the water used is retained for humidity control, meaning it evaporates. Especially in drier regions, unhumidified air can grow to be a powerful conductor of static electricity, which will likely be bad for computers.
