. According to analysis by the Guardian, two-thirds of planned datacentres in the US are in drought-stricken areas. The larger centres need up to 5m gallons of water a day for cooling, equivalent to the average usage of 50,000 people. It is unclear what the plan is and whose needs will take priority between AI, agriculture and everyone else.
“People are reporting bill spikes,” [Erin]Brockovich says, reading an email from someone who says their monthly water bill went from $22 (£17) to more than $350 (£265). The threat of these centres is about more than money – it feels existential. “How will the water use disrupt the balance of nature? People are asking: “What will happen to us?”
You’ve got that backwards. The power generation is an issue in and of itself but from a water standpoint it’s not the main driver.
Servers require massive amounts of energy to run their calculations, a lot of that energy becomes residual heat. It’s just basic physics we’ve not been able to overcome. Old data centers weren’t as bad because they’d be also full of hard drives and tape backups and other things. Not just processors. These other things didn’t generate anywhere near as much heat and weren’t as dense. The new AI datacenters are just packed basically every square inch with processors, they’re insanely dense compared to the old data centers and filled with the highest heat generators.
In order to keep the things from melting the heat is moved and radiated using the water, this causes a large chunk of it to heat up and evaporate. You won’t get raw info on how much because they’ve tried extremely hard to not let it get released, calling it a trade secret and such. Water to cool data centers isn’t new and the physics of it is well understood (which is why hobby gamers use liquid coolers and such too), it’s just never been at this scale before. It’s not been millions of gallons a day per center.