While much of the conversation around the data centre industry’s environmental impact tends to focus on its (operational and embedded) carbon footprint, there’s another critical resource that data centres consume in addition to electricity: water.
Data centres consume a lot of water. Hyperscale data centres in particular, like those used to host cloud workloads (and, increasingly, generative AI applications) consume twice as much water as the average enterprise data centre.
Server farming is thirsty work
Data from Dgtl Infra suggests that, while the average retail colocation data centre consumes around 18,000 gallons of water per day (about the same as 51 households), a hyperscale facility like the ones operated by Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), consumes an average of 550,000 gallons of water every day.
This means that clusters of hyperscale data centres — in addition to placing remarkable strain on local power grids — drink up as much water as entire towns. In parts of the world where the climate crisis is making water increasingly scarce, local municipalities are increasingly being forced to choose between having enough water to fuel the local hyperscale facility or provide clean drinking water to their residents. In many poorer parts of the world, tech giants with deep pockets are winning out over the basic human rights of locals. And, as more and more cap-ex is thrown at generative AI (despite the fact the technology might not actually be very, uh, good), these facilities are consuming more energy and more water all the time, placing more and more stress on local water supplies.
A report by the Financial Times in August found that water consumption across dozens of data centres in Virginia had risen by close to two-thirds since 2019. Facilities in the world’s largest data centre market consumed at least 1.85 billion gallons of water last year, according to records obtained by the Financial Times via freedom of information requests. Another study found that data centres operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta draw twice as much water from rivers and aquifers as the entire country of Denmark.
AWS pledges water positivity in Santiago
Earlier in 2024, AWS announced plans to build two new data centre facilities in Santiago, Chile, a city that has emerged in the past decade as the leading hub for the country’s tech industry. The facilities will be AWS’ first in Latin America.
The announcement faced widespread protests from local residents and climate experts critical of AWS’ plans to build highly water-intensive facilities in one of the most water stressed regions in the world. Chile’s reservoirs — suffering from over a decade of climate-crisis-related drought — are drying up. The addition of more massive, thirsty data centres at a time when the country desperately needs all the water it can get has been widely protested. Shortly afterwards, AWS made a second announcement. This, on the face of it, wasan answer to the question: where will Chile get the water to power these new facilities?
Amazon said it will invest in water conservation along the Maipo River — the main source of water for Santiago and the surrounding area. The company says it will partner with a water technology startup that helps farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. If successful, the plan will conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year. It’s part of AWS’ campaign, announced in 2022, to become “water positive” by 2030.
Being “water positive” means conserving or replenishing more water than a company and its facilities uses. AWS isn’t the only hyperscaler to make such pledges; Microsoft made a similar one following local resistance to its facilities in the Netherlands, and Meta isn’t far behind.
However, much like pledges to become “net zero” when it comes to carbon emissions, water positivity pledges are more complicated than hyperscalers’ websites would have you believe.
“Water positive” — a convenient omission
While it’s true that AWS and other hyperscalers have taken significant steps towards reducing the amount of water consumed at their facilities, the power plants providing electricity for these data centres are still consuming huge amounts of water. Many hyperscalers conveniently leave this detail out of their water usage calculations.
“Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem,” argued a recent article published in Grist. As energy consumption continues to rise, the uncomfortable knock-on consumption effects will also rise, as even relatively water-sustainable operations like AWS continue to push local energy infrastructure to consumer more water to keep up with demand.
AWS may be funding dozens of conservation projects in the areas where it builds facilities, but despite claiming to be 41% of the way to being “water positive”, the company is still not anywhere near accounting for the water consumed in the generation of electricity used to power its facilities. Even setting aside this glaring omission, AWS still only conserves 4 gallons of water for every 10 gallons it consumes.
- Infrastructure & Cloud
- Sustainability Technology
