Sep 07 2023 51 mins 7
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate is a postdoctoral researcher in the Fixing Futures research training group at Goethe University. As a graduate of MIT's History, Anthropology, Science, Technology & Society program, his dissertation project, "Cloud Ecologies", is an ethnography of data centers and their environmental impacts in the United States, Puerto Rico, Iceland, and Singapore.
There is a global freshwater crisis and this crisis is being accelerated by data centers’ incredible thirst for water. Steven talks to Gerry about the environmental impact data centers are having on fresh water supply, particularly in water-stressed areas, and how it is likely to get worse because AI is particularly water intense
Some selected quotes from Steven:
Some scholars are estimating that anything from 5% to 10% of data center water comes from alternative water sources, like grey water, sea water. But the vast majority is drinking water. And there are a few reasons for this. One is the biohazard. As water is being warmed and flowing through these data centers, microorganisms flourish in these conditions. That is one reason why data centers turn to drinking water because that water has already to some degree been treated, so there is less of s risk of these microbial blooms happening. For the same microbial reason, the water can’t be endlessly recycled. It has to be dumped or returned to the sewers because even with reverse-osmosis filters and other techniques, these microbes will flourish.
Some water, when it evaporates can leave behind really corrosive particulates of various kinds.
The data centers will come if you offer them the right incentives around land, water and electricity, even is these incentives are fundamentally unsustainable, if they’re irresponsible, if they’re suicidal or self-destructive.
If you have access to cheap fresh water, deserts are a great place for data centers because they are so dry—and computers hate moisture and high humidity. That’s why there are so many data centers in Arizona “It’s almost like the goldrush. It’s a water-rush. All these companies are clustering to get this cheap water. But it’s doomed.” As the suicidal spiral by data centers and industrial farming circles the drains in even more frenzied swirls, “We see how communities are struggling to pay their water bills while data centers and other industries are getting water at a much cheaper rate. There are farmers who are directly competing with data centers to grow food. Indigenous communities are also having difficulties accessing water. The draining of the Colorado river is affecting the migration patterns of salmon and other fish, which are really important to the lifecycles.
These data centers will not last. I think that’s another important point for people to realize. These data centers are ephemeral. They know that they will eventually have to disband. This is the kind of perversity of data centers coming into many communities with these promises of economic growth. There is certainly a lot of jobs that are created to construct the data center. But once a data center has actually been constructed, it’s only a handful of people who actually run a facility. So, in some cases, just a dozen people, or two dozen people, run a facility that is consuming as much electricity as a small city. A data center life is between five and twenty years. This is not a permanent industry. It is extractive, like mines.
