With its affordable land and modest electricity rates, Iowa has become a magnet for data centers for some of the world's tech giants.
A river with low levels of water flows under Highway 65 near Bondurant, Iowa. Iowa is suffering through a prolonged drought that heightens concerns about the water use by the state's data centers.Johannsen's group is tracking the increasing water usage by the state's data centers, most of them clustered in suburbs around Des Moines.
As many major tech companies position themselves to rapidly scale up operations to support AI, they must also reckon with their growing water demand. And some data center host communities in water-scarce regions could face difficult choices amid a dearth of solid information about how much water they might be giving up.
"When we generate electricity using coal-based power plants, using nuclear power plants, we are actually also consuming a lot of water," he explained, and AI is sharply boosting the energy that data centers need. Iron Mountain's data center in Boyers, Pennsylvania, is more than 200 feet underground where the naturally cool air cuts the need for energy and water to maintain the temperature of servers.Ren said Microsoft's total water use grew by 34 percent in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, and that increase is likely due at least in part to AI's demands.
"You've got sort of the yin and the Yang, the counterbalance of the two, figuring out which one you're going to focus more of your effort on," Hollis toldWhere clean energy is abundant and water is scarce, he said, the company uses more air-cooling methods to reduce water impacts, and closed-loop systems prevent loss due to evaporation.
A lake in an old limestone quarry provides cooling water for an underground data center constructed by the company Iron Mountain.A pump lifts the water from the lake to a heat exchanger where the cool water carries heat away from the closed-loop cooling system that circulates among the servers. That water is then returned to the lake. Being underground also makes the site highly secure, a selling point for some Iron Mountain clients who handle sensitive data.
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