by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
(Investigate Midwest) 1. They use enormous amounts of water
Data centers, which store and process the digital information needed for everyday online activities, often consume large amounts of water to keep servers cool — especially the new hyperscale facilities typically built for artificial intelligence (AI).
Google’s data center in Pryor, Oklahoma — one of the company’s largest facilities — uses about 1.1 billion gallons of water each year. That is equal to about 8.3 billion water bottles or the annual water use of 10,000 average American households.
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The Pryor data center uses an evaporative cooling system, so most of the water used for cooling is lost to evaporation. Of the 1.1 billion gallons of water used, only about 275 million gallons of drinking water are discharged back into the river for reuse.
The industry is feeling the pressure to move away from that technology, and some new facilities are looking to install closed-loop systems, which recycle water in a continuous cycle, or air-cooled systems. These systems use little water but require much more electricity.
2. Researchers know little about water pollution
Not much is known about how water discharge from data centers impacts the environment. A recent study on the issue notes that “there is a clear lack of transparency in data center cooling water discharge practices.”
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