AI data centers are draining water from this drought-stricken Mexican town
therealnews.com
The city of Colón in Queretaro state is now home to three massive data centers run by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon—and the companies are refusing to disclose how much local water they use.
    • WalnutLum@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 month ago

      Most data centers evaporative cooling from what I understand, and according to This

      Cooling towers use water evaporation to reject heat from the data center causing losses approximately equal to the latent heat of vaporization for water, along with some additional losses for drift and blowdown. In larger data centers this on site water consumption can be significant, with data centers that have 15 MW of IT capacity consuming between 80-130 million gallons annually. n this study, on-site water consumption is estimated at 1.8 liters (0.46 gallons) per kWh of total data center site energy use for all data centers except for closet and room data centers, which are assumed to use direct expansion (air-cooled chillers).

      And seeing as hyperscale data centers usually use between 20-50 megawatts per data center, and there’s three of them in Colon, that’s like at least 240 million gallons of water a year.

      Yikes.