I & I Editorial BoardHow many times have you heard that data centers are water hogs and are pushing up electricity costs? What if neither is true?
Take the scary claims about water.
The World Resources Institute says that “recent estimates project that by 2028, AI-related data centers in the U.S. could require up to 32 billion gallons of water annually. This is enough to support roughly 360,000 households’ indoor water use.” (Emphasis in original.)
On its own, that sounds like a scary number.
But our friends at Unleash Prosperity did something few reporting on this issue have bothered to do: they looked at water consumption for other things, such as filling swimming pools, watering golf courses, and growing corn.
Take a look at the chart they put together. It’s truly eye-popping.
Even if that 32 billion number is realistic, it would still 38% less than is used to grow watermelons each year.
And if today’s data center water use (about 17 billion gallons a year) went up 100-fold, it would still be less than we use to water our lawns and for landscaping each year.
And what about the cost imposed on households in the form of higher electricity bills? Yes, data centers do use a lot of electricity.
But if data centers were having a big effect on electricity rates, you’d figure that states with more of them would have higher costs.
Well, Virginia has more than twice as many data centers as California. Yet Virginians pay half as much for electricity as Californians.
Hawaii, the state with the nation’s highest electricity rates, has only nine data centers. Maine, the third most expensive state, has 11.
Turns out that it’s renewable energy mandates, not data centers, that are driving up electricity costs.
A Heritage Foundation report found that eight of the 10 states with the highest electricity costs require that more than a third of their electricity comes from renewable energy.
Only one of the states with the lowest energy bills had any renewable mandate. The one exception is Washington, which is blessed with an abundance of mountains and rivers and gets most of its electricity from hydroelectric plants.
As the Atlantic – which can hardly be described as a right-wing, free-market publication – pointed out last week, “the data-center panic is overblown. Most of the complaints inflate the costs of data centers and overlook the fact that, in some contexts at least, they can bring real benefits.”
It notes that Loudoun County, Virginia, which alone houses more computing power than all of Beijing, raises almost half its property tax revenue from data centers that take up only 3% of its land.
“We’ve been able to build 32 schools and 16 fire stations and six libraries and miles of roads and more than 1,000 acres of parks and recreation, and started an affordable-housing program,” Buddy Rizer, the county’s chief development officer, told the magazine, “all while lowering the tax rate on our citizens.”
You’ll never hear any of this from Bernie Sanders or AOC or any of the other politicians and activists demanding a halt to data center construction.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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Johnny Kampis
The problem with comparing Virginia for example and its data centers is many of Virginia’s data centers were built many years ago. It is only within the past 6 years or so that these newer centers are much larger and require much more water and electricity. With the conundrum of going to close loop technology cooling systems minimizes water usage but swings the pendulum of high electricity usage. Your article is fraught with generalities and ambiguity.
Tell that to the people in Georgia and Texas who already have these issues. Maybe stop defending the indefensible
This column was to me a stunner. I never thought of comparing Water Usage in AI to farmlands, landscaping or swimming pools etc. The amount of water usage AI data centers use seem must less ourtageous.
I&I’s argument for the electricity used hasn’t convinced me that the electricity needed for AI Data Centers won’t lead to higher consumer electric costs. Since power is a finite resource when demand is increased and the supply stays the same the price will increase.
Two qualifications: Trump is tapping into our huge dormant energy resources (so supply could increase) and the benefits of AI may be worth the additional consumer cost.
While AI positively effects, for example, medicine and defense products I don’t know if the way, for instance, Google and chatbox uses it is such a benefit that it mutes the extra cost of electricity to the consumer who is affected by the increase in electricity costs.
But, the water usage-as I mentioned-is an eye opener. Also, I thank I&I for it’s water-usage graphic presentation.
It’s true that the water volume for data centers is relatively minimal, but there are other issues around water, such as the wastewater pollution and the high concentration of water use in a local area.
The argument here about the water is valid. But the part about electricity is not. Comparing Virginia to California is apples to oranges. What you really want to compare is “Virginia with data centers” against “Virginia if it did not have the data centers.” A quick check of public sources shows that data centers consume about 25% of the state’s electricity, which is quite a lot and it’s hard to argue that wouldn’t have an impact on costs.
What do you mean,”what if”? The data center scare is as ridiculously overblown as nuclear power, and being pushed by the same bad actors.
Nuclear power has a lot of costly requirements around health, safety, and security, and it’s hard to argue that they are ridiculously overblown. These are wonkish technical issues, and it doesn’t really work to call each other bad actors.
But I’ll bite. Which specific safety requirements around nuclear power would you say are overblown and need to be removed? And if we did remove them so the power plant construction became more economically viable by cutting those corners, which insurance companies do you think would be ready to insure against the potential nuclear accidents?
Remarkable about this topic is that data centres and the additional power stations needed to run the big ones are not viewed as a huge free source of low grade process heat. Essentially 100% of energy fed into a sever farm is turned into heat. I live in Alberta and wrote a proposal to build food production system fed by a server farm near Granda Prairie. It would generate enough heat to support at least 2000 acres of greenhouses all year. The CO2 from the power station is six times what is needed to raise the greenhouses above 1000 ppm to optimize plant growth. One such server farm would produce enough fresh fruit and vegetables to supply British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Montana and Idaho, all presently bringing about 80% of it from California and Mexico. The simple repayment period is 2.5 years and annual profit would by $5 bn per year, creating 22,000 jobs directly and 33,000 indirectly. At present all that heat is wasted. So is the CO2 – a huge resource in agriculture. Think more systematically.