Hard with Climate Change, Harder with Data Centers all over the Place

Microsoft consumed seven million, eight hundred thousand cubic meters of water in 2023, from six million, four hundred thousand cubic meters the year before, mainly to cool its numerous data centers, with AI workloads seen  to be partially responsible for the rise.

Google consumed 5.6 billion gallons of water in 2022, a 20 percent increase over the year before, the company using more than 2.3 billion gallons of water in 2019 for three different states in the United States, also to mainly cool its many installations of data centers.

Amazon data centers,  according to a public report, consumed 0.19 liters of water per kilowatt hour (kWH), mainly for cooling, not surprising, because an average data center uses 1.8 liters of water per kWH.

Tech companies consume billions of gallons of water every year to power their data centers, with a report putting the figure around the world at more than 4.3 trillion cubic meters (around 1.1 quadrillion gallons) of water every year.

Microsoft partners with OpenAl for AI deployment, but OpenAI’s ChatGPT consumes 500 ml of water for every five to 50 questions it answers, while OpenAI’s GPT4 model consumes up to three water bottles to generate one hundred words.

Google gravitates  towards AI deployment, and data center powers this, with the company admitting that its annual water consumption equals the amount used for 29 golf courses in the southwestern parts of the United States, an area challenged by drought in the past few decades.

Amazon plans on expanding its AI deployment, so it seeks to open two new data centers in Santiago, Chile, hoping to commit as much as $400 million on the project, and planning to spend $100 billion to build more of the centers in the next decade.

With AI deployment utilizing billions of gallons of water per year, tech companies use a lot of it to power their data centers, but this takes place at a period of a climate crisis, bringing severe consequences.

Climate Change exacerbates water scarcity, and with about two billion people worldwide not having water, and only 0.5 percent water on earth usable and available freshwater, tech companies worsen the situation, through their massive data centers, further complicating the environment through carbon emissions.

Climate change causes temperature rises, and with the figure having risen by 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1850, and the rate of warming three times as fast since 1982, data centers worsen the situation with water, forcing tech companies to deplete water sources in their search for water for cooling, a trend that made experts predict that data center water usage could top 1.7 billion liters (450 million gallons) daily by 2030, more than double the consumption in 2017.

Climate change poses a threat in yet another way with AI deployment, through fluctuating temperatures, resulting in downtime of data center operations.

With climate change possibly complicating the situation with data centers now and in the near future, tech companies must look into ways to solve the issue of water consumption in their operations, to prevent a crisis on the environmental front.

They could erect data centers in cooler climates to reduce the need for water, or use other cooling methods, or locate them in regions where they won’t be in conflict with local water use.

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