Water droughts are threatening Big Tech data centres – Charged Retail
Drought conditions in the US are threatening the functionality of some of Big Tech’s data centres that house the internet.
Data centres use huge amounts of heat due to the power that is required to size of the servers. In order to keep the data centres cool and functioning properly, they require a huge amounts of water.
The average data centre uses up to 300,000 gallons of water to cool itself each day, the equivalent consumption level of 100,000 homes, according to research from Virginia Tech.
Virginia Tech estimated that one in five data centres draws water from stressed watersheds mostly in the west.
“There is, without a doubt, risk if you’re dependent on water,” data centre owner, CyrusOne, vice president of environmental health, safety & sustainability Kyle Myers told CNBC.
CyrusOne owns 40 data centres in North America, Europe and South America.
“These data centers are set up to operate 20 years, so what is it going to look like in 2040 here, right?,” he added.
When CyrusOne moved into the dry region of Phoenix, Texas, it had to invest in more a expensive method of cooling.
“That was sort of our ‘aha moment.’ where we had to make a decision. We changed our design to go to zero consumption water, so that we didn’t have that sort of risk,” said Myers.
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Facebook owner, Meta, ran a pilot program on its data centre in Los Lunas, New Mexico in an attempt to reduce the humidity from 20% to 13%, lowering its water consumption.
Since observing the success of the trial in New Mexico, It has since implemented this in all of its centres.
Despite the move, Meta’s overall water consumption is still steadily rising, one fifth of the water consumption from last year came from areas deemed to have “water stress,” according to its website.
It does actively restore water and set a goal last year to restore more water than it consumes by 2030, starting in the west.
Big Tech giant, Microsoft, also set a goal to be “water positive” by 2030.
“The good news is we’ve been investing for years in ongoing innovation in this space so that fundamentally we can recycle almost all of the water we use in our data centers,” Microsoft president Brad Smith told CNBC.
“In places where it rains, like the Pacific Northwest where we’re headquartered in Seattle, we collect rain from the roof. In places where it doesn’t rain like Arizona, we develop condensation techniques.”
While companies with their own data centers can do that, so-called co-location data centers that lease to multiple clients are increasingly being bought by private equity firms in search of high-growth real estate.
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