Data centers don’t have to drink the town dry

Data centers built to power artificial intelligence use huge amounts of water for cooling, and that's drawing scrutiny in places where local water supplies are already stretched. A single large data center campus can use up to 5 million gallons a day, roughly what a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people uses, often drawn from the same treated water residents drink. In Corpus Christi, Texas, industrial users account for more than half of regional water demand, and the city came close to running out of water this year.

There are ways to cut or eliminate that water use. Liquid cooling systems, including full immersion cooling, remove heat from servers without evaporating water at all. Some companies, including Microsoft, are building "closed-loop" designs that circulate a fixed supply of water or refrigerant instead of continually pulling in fresh water, with pilot projects underway in Arizona and Wisconsin. Other developers are sourcing cooling water from treated wastewater rather than drinking supplies, or reusing the same water repeatedly instead of discharging it after one pass, which can cut water needs by up to 75 percent.

One company mentioned in the article, Arbor, is going further with turbines that generate water as a byproduct of power generation, meant to supply a nearby data center's cooling system without touching the local water supply at all.

None of this requires anything from homeowners directly, but it matters if you live near a proposed data center or in a region facing water restrictions. How these facilities are built affects whether they compete with your household for water, or not.