When Jenn Duff heard that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, wanted to build yet another data center in Mesa, Ariz., she was immediately suspicious. "My first reaction was concern for our water," Duff said. The desert city of half a million residents was already home to large data centers owned by Google, Apple and other tech giants, and Duff, a city council member, feared for the city's future water supply.
"It's not like we're sitting fat and happy in water," she said. "We're still constantly looking at the drought situation."
Related: Data Center Water Management: How Amazon and Google Steward Earth's Most Vital Resource
Mesa is only one of many cities and towns in the West wrestling with the expansion of water-guzzling data centers. For years, data centers have come under scrutiny for their carbon emissions. But now, as a "megadrought" continues to ravage the Southwest and the Colorado River dwindles, some communities charge that the centers are also draining local water supplies.
In The Dalles, Ore., a local paper fought to unearth information revealing that a Google data center uses over a quarter of the city's water. In Los Lunas, N.M., farmers protested a decision by the city to allow a Meta data center to move into the area.
More than 30 percent of the world's data centers are located in the United States; the power required to run those centers already accounts for about 2 percent of the nation's electricity use. As the data storage requirements of the planet escalate - and as water becomes scarcer because of climate change - these operations may attract greater scrutiny.
It's common to think of the stuff of digital life - the photos, the videos, the webpages, the e-books, the reams and reams of data - as somehow lighter than air, existing in "the cloud" or zipping along global wireless networks. The reality, however, is much more concrete. The dozens of zettabytes of data produced every year (a zettabyte is a gigantic unit of data, equal to about 250 billion DVDs) are increasingly stored in thousands of data centers around the world, where massive servers keep the internet afloat.
Those servers require a great deal of energy and produce a great deal of heat. Without adequate cooling, the servers can overheat, fail or even catch fire. Companies can either use traditional air conditioning to cool the servers, which is expensive, or use water for evaporative cooling. The latter is cheaper, but it also sucks up millions of gallons of water. A large data center, researchers say, can gobble up anywhere between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water a day - as much as a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.
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