The Big Data Center Water Problem

A datacenter with 15 megawatts of IT capacity is estimated to use about 80-130 million gallons of water each year.

That is as much water as three hospitals, or two 18-hole golf courses.

The current AI boom has the world's tech giants building big data centers across the world.

We all know they need a lot of energy. But what about water?The two are very closely tied together.

This channel has a not-so-secret obsession with water. In this video, we look at the data center's massive water footprint.

Types of Data Centers

Data centers come in all sizes and functions.

Some small enough to fit into a closet. Or massive custom-built facilities that span entire football fields. Generally we classify them by floor space, the number of servers inside them, or how much power they consume during operations.

The biggest facilities are referred to as "hyper scale" - having about 5,000 servers and being 10,000 square meters large.

Facilities built by global-scale operators like Google or Meta are often used for their global-scale applications - Gmail or Facebook or something like that.

But data centers can also be leased out to customers. For security, latency, and reliability reasons, cloud providers need to build these cloud data centers in a range of zones. These hyperscale facilities are so large because of energy efficiency scaling and economics.

We measure a data center's energy efficiency through power usage effectiveness or PUE. PUE is calculated by dividing the total energy delivered by the total energy going to the ICT equipment.

So the most efficient possible efficiency rating would be 1.0 - meaning that 100% of the energy going in is used on ICT.

The larger a data center is, the lower their PUE tends to be. Google and Microsoft claim that their hyperscale data centers have a PUE of 1.2 or 1.1. A closet data center on the other hand might have 2.5 or so.

This gap is almost entirely attributable to cooling. Hyperscale data centers can afford more efficient cooling systems, modeling airflows through the aisles or even employ liquid cooling systems. So let us talk cooling.

Cooling

Almost all of a data center's consumed electricity is converted to heat.

Even if a data center isn't working at its full capacity - and they rarely are - it is still withdrawing 60-100% of its maximum power. That is a whole lot of heat. ...