In so many ways, data center water use is more intensive than the way an ordinary person uses water, as Shaolei Ren explained to Reece Rogers for Wired:
“The water that is available for people to use is very limited. It’s just the fresh surface water and groundwater. Those data centers, they’re just evaporating water into the air. They’re different from normal, residential users. When we get the water from the utility, and then we discharge the water back to the sewage immediately, we are just withdrawing water—we’re not consuming water. A data center takes the water from this utility, and they evaporate the water into the sky, into the atmosphere, where it may not return to the earth’s surface until a year later.”
Data centers love to be efficient. That’s why they love deserts, because dry air reduces the risk of damage and corrosion to their sensitive servers and other electrical equipment, and thus helps them to run more cost effectively and efficiently. As Steven Gonzalez explained to me:
“If you have access to cheap fresh water, deserts are a great place for data centers because they are so dry—and computers hate moisture and high humidity. That’s why there are so many data centers in Arizona. It’s almost like the goldrush. It’s a water-rush. All these companies are clustering to get this cheap water. But it’s doomed. We see how communities are struggling to pay their water bills, while data centers and other industries are getting water at a much cheaper rate. There are farmers who are directly competing with data centers to grow food. Indigenous communities are also having difficulties accessing water. The draining of the Colorado river is affecting the migration patterns of salmon and other fish, which are really important to their lifecycles.”
Of course, water evaporation in a desert environment is going to be very intense. Nicolas Dubé of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, described it as a criminal activity.
“Some hyperscalers, I’m not going to name them, built large datacenters in Arizona, New Mexico, and very dry countries. You build datacenters there, and if you use evaporative cooling, you’re going to have spectacular PUE (Power Use Efficiency). However, you’re going to consume a resource that’s way more important to that community than optimizing for a few percent of the energy consumption. I think that’s criminal. I think they should be jailed for doing that.”
Big Tech capitalist pursuit of efficiency and lowest costs is not simply ruinous to local water and to freshwater supply in general. “There is more moisture in a warming sky, a 7% increase for every degree Celsius of warming,” Kate Marvel wrote in The Climate Book. Data center evaporative cooling sends even more water up into the atmosphere, thus accelerating global warming and super storms. Historically, this water was used by plants and animals, stored in soils or underground in aquifers. Now, it’s up in the skies, accelerating droughts and super storms, where it can rain more in one day than it usually rains in a year. Droughts and floods are terrible twins.