“Drought conditions are worsening on USA", he says CNBC, "and that has a huge impact on the spaces that house the Internet."
The water is the cheapest and most common method used to cool data centers. In one day, one medium centre data center could use 300.000 gallons of water to cool it — the same water consumption as 100.000 homes, according to Virginia Tech researchers who also estimated that one in five data centers draws water from "stressed" watersheds mostly in the West.
"There is, without a doubt, risk if you depend on water," said Kyle Myers, vice president of environmental healthsecurity and sustainability of CyrusOne, which owns and operates over 40 data centers in North America, Europe and South America. “These data centers are built to last 20 years, so what will it be like in 2040?”
Realizing the risk of water shortages in New Mexico, Meta is running a pilot program at its Los Lunas data center to reduce water consumption. It wants to implement the same program in all its data centers. However, Meta's total water consumption continues to rise steadily, with a fifth of that water last year coming from areas deemed to be experiencing "water stress", according to its website. So it restores water and set a goal last year to restore more water than it consumes by 2030, starting in the west.
Microsoft also says it has set a goal to be "water friendly" by 2030.
"The good news is that we've been investing for years in continuous innovation in this space so that we can essentially recycle almost all of the water we use in our data centers," said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft.
“In places where it rains, like the Pacific Northwest where we're based in Seattle, we collect the rain from the roofs of buildings. In places where it doesn't rain like Arizona, we're developing condensation techniques.”
