Data Centers Are a Thirsty Bunch
Mary-Anna Holden is a former New Jersey BPU Commissioner and Butch Howard is a former South Carolina PSC Commissioner.
New alarm bells signal an impending drinking water crisis. While the nation has been focused on an energy crisis triggered by unprecedented new additional load being added to the electrical grid from data center demand, scarcely anyone is focused on the related competition for water.
Data centers need clean, drinking-water quantity and quality, and in the case of artificial intelligence chips, production as well. Ultrapure water is needed for wafer fabrication, cleaning, etching, and rinsing. It takes fifteen hundred gallons of piped potable water to produce a thousand gallons of ultrapure water, or about ten million gallons of ultrapure water consumed per day by a chips manufacturer.
While electricity may be generated from a variety of sources, it doesn’t matter what the electricity is generated by: nuclear, natural gas, or renewables of some kind, since the electrons don’t know their source. The phrase, “bring your own power,” is frequently tossed about, but that phrase is itself inherently vague. It even suggests possible microgrids in constrained areas. Because of how water is used or consumed, the same cannot be said for water sourcing.