A.I. tools fueled a 34% spike in Microsoft’s water consumption, and one city with its data centers is concerned about the effect on residential supply
A.I. tools fueled a 34% spike in Microsoft’s water consumption, and one city with its data centers is concerned about the effect on residential supply
“They were pretty secretive on what they’re doing out there,” says a former mayor about Microsoft’s data center projects.
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People should be getting priority over AI.
When the robot revolution begins, they're going to come after you.
This is why I say please and thank you to Alexa (also to model appropriate behavior for my young kids).
I live here and people are getting priority over AI?
Iowa isn't like many states where there is water scarcity. This cooling water isn't even being consumed. It's used for cooling and returned to the waste water system.
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Pretty much, unfortunately.
Nobody wants to talk about all the wind energy used to run these data centers either, because that won't generate any outrage.
We live in a society
That would be considered consumed.
Not really. At least not in the sense that it's a net loss of water downstream.
It's not like irrigation or bottling, where water is entirely removed from the system and not returned.
It is removed from the system. It's not practically immediately recoverable. The capacity to supply that water has been spent.
If you want to talk about water treatment capacity, then sure. Treatment capacity is used for cooling.
That's not what I'm talking about though. I'm talking about the mass of water being consumed (i.e., removed) from the watershed. The water removed from the river for cooling is returned. There is no net loss of water.
There is a net loss of potable water (or potable water capacity, if you prefer), which is often a capacity bottleneck before non-potable water due to the infrastructure required to generate it. However, according to a comment above, Microsoft is using evaporative coolers, which specifically work by losing water (through evaporation). It's not a 100% loss rate to the watershed, but it's not net zero either
At Meta we have a massive system for cutting out our net effect on water for the local area. I'm in NM and the DC here is almost actually adding to the water. I can't imagine Microsoft would behind as to not do this. It's an open design.
The water isn't dirty. It's warm. It would use even more energy to cool it. It's a lose-lose.
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Warm water is the waste product because it's easier dump the water than to cool the water. Returning the warm water to a usable state is much more expensive at scale.
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you might be right but some numbers might back up your claim. I doubt that servers could heat water as much as a nuclear reactor. datacenter coolers certainly don't have to pressurize the water to prevent it from boiling, it doesn't get that hot.