That data centers are siphoning away precious water is a theme that trickles through much of the criticism of them, criticism that typically does not stand up to much examination.
Fears about the amount of water required by the centers in absolute terms are exaggerated. But it can also be worth looking at the centers’ relative demand.
Data centers directly consumed 46 million gallons a day in 2023, according to a report produced by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Their indirect consumption from the power plants serving them added another 576 million gallons of water consumed daily, for a combined daily total of 625 million.
That’s a lot of water. It’s also a very small percentage (0.2 percent) of the 322 billion gallons of water that the United States consumes each day.
And how does that compare with the (admittedly notoriously) thirsty almond?
California’s almond industry consumes almost 4.2 billion gallons of water a day, according to the California Water Impact Network. . . .
Moreover, as
It includes water lost to evaporation from the reservoirs that store water used by hydroelectric power plants, as the engineer Brian Potter has noted in his Construction Physics newsletter. Potter argues that while dams and reservoirs lead to additional evaporation, they also make additional fresh water available for use in drier seasons. That evaporation will also occur regardless of whether reservoir water is used to generate power.
If you exclude that from data centers’ consumption, their combined water use falls to a lowly 250 million gallons a day.
Either way, the number is manageable, even as data center electricity use expands, although local factors in areas where data centers are being considered will also have to be taken into account. A potentially much trickier issue will revolve around the implications of the centers’ need for more electricity, but that is a question for another time.
It is true that you cannot (literally) eat data, and it is true that people eat almonds, a disappointing variety of nut in my view (although I love marzipan), but, as Reason’s Robby Soave points out:
You can’t eat an oil rig, a suspension bridge, or a satellite. Yet it should be obvious that these are no less useful — even factoring in land, energy, and water use — than almonds, even if the benefits are slightly less straightforward. This is plainly true for data centers as well. . . .
Indeed.