Big Tech will only partly dissolve AI water risk
Antony Currie

February 23, 20264:00 PM CST

-snip-

In any event, on-site water needs don’t paint the whole picture. First, data centres consume a lot of electricity. That’s still mostly provided by gas and coal, which chug even more water. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for example, estimated, opens new tab that U.S. data centres directly consumed around 66 billion litres in 2023, whereas the indirect effect through energy consumption was 800 billion litres. That puts Nvidia’s Vera Rubin claims in context. Huang stated that the new system would cut power needs by 6% – a useful fillip to the bottom line, but not so much for reservoirs.

Second, data centres tend to flock to clusters, like in Arizona, Virginia and Singapore. It just so happens, though, that many of these hubs are also places with chronic water issues. Almost half of data centres are in areas of high or very high water stress, per S&P Global, whether because they’re in arid regions or because the liquid has already been allocated to other users. Some 80% of those sites deal with older cloud-computing workloads, which predate the AI boom, and therefore probably won’t ever be upgraded to the cutting edge closed-loop systems that Huang and Smith talked about.

Some clusters are also home to the plants that make data centre chips. Taiwan’s TSMC, for example, is expanding in Arizona, where Intel also operates. These semiconductor factories require ultra-pure water to clean the chips. Only a small percentage is typically recycled. These so-called fabs can use as much water in a week as a food processing plant gets through in a year, estimates one industry insider.

Meanwhile, climate is making water availability even more unpredictable. Phoenix is heavily dependent on the Colorado River. Its flow has been receding for 20 years and its two main reservoirs are 30% full. One water utility in Melbourne, which experienced a decade-long drought at the start of the century, is assessing applications for 19 data centres that between them would want permits for 20 billion litres a year.

-snip-