With all the focus on power consumption, the water consumption of data centers has been somewhat overlooked. However, red flags are being raised in the United Kingdom, and those concerns that have application in the US as well and elsewhere.
Data centers are already wearing out their welcome in certain areas.
They are enormous buildings and even with modern designs are considered an eyesore, especially when you have dozens of them in one area like in Northern Virginia. And they draw heavily on local power resources, which is the main complaint, but now they’re also taking up lots of water.
A BBC report cites research from Venkatesh Uddameri, a professor of civil & environmental engineering at Lamar University, who stated that a typical data center can use between 11 million and 19 million liters (2.9 million to five million gallons) of water per day, roughly the same as a town of 30,000 to 50,000 people.
Data centers need so much water because it is used in a variety of functions. Water is clearly used in direct to chip cooling, although that water has to be heavily filtered and purified. It is also used in air-conditioning and for cooling the power generators as well, which can be considerable considering these data centers are the size of a shopping mall.
One such example is Microsoft’s global water use soared by 34% while it was developing its initial AI tools, according to reports, and a data center cluster in Iowa used 6% of the district’s water supply in one month during the training of OpenAI’s GPT-4.
In a new report, the Royal Academy of Engineering called upon the government to ensure tech companies accurately report how much energy and water their data centers are using and reducing the use of drinking water for cooling.
Without such action, warns one of the report’s authors, Professor Tom Rodden, “we face a real risk that our development, deployment and use of AI could do irreparable damage to the environment.”
The situation is a little different for the US as the country has large bodies of water offering a water supply that the UK just does not have.
It’s not an accident that there are many data centers around the Chicago area: they’ve also got the Great Lakes to draw upon. Likewise, the Columbia and Klamath Rivers have become magnets for data centers for both water supply and hydroelectric power. Other than the Thames River, the UK doesn’t have these massive bodies of water.
Still, the problem is not unique to the UK, says Alan Howard, senior analyst with Omdia. He notes that Microsoft took heat last year because it was draining the water supply of a small Arizona town of Goodyear with a new AI-oriented data center.
The city of Chandler, Arizona passed an ordinance in 2015 that restricted new water-intensive businesses from setting up shop which slowed data center development. “I believe some data center operators just bowed out,” said Howard.
“Considering the numbers presented in the article, I feel the industry needs a benchmark, like how much water is required per unit device/rack/square foot area. Power utilization in a data center has benchmark likewise water consumption should also have one,” said Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester Research.
Source:: Network World