The city of Colón in Queretaro state is now home to three massive data centers run by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon—and the companies are refusing to disclose how much local water they use.
The only way I can imagine a data center “consuming” water is by evaporative cooling. Querétaro is dry country, where this should work well, so that makes sense.
Most data centers evaporative cooling from what I understand, and according to This
Cooling towers use water evaporation to reject heat from the data center causing
losses approximately equal to the latent heat of vaporization for water, along with some
additional losses for drift and blowdown. In larger data centers this on site water consumption
can be significant, with data centers that have 15 MW of IT capacity consuming between 80-130
million gallons annually. n this study, on-site water consumption is estimated at 1.8 liters
(0.46 gallons) per kWh of total data center site energy use for all data centers except for closet
and room data centers, which are assumed to use direct expansion (air-cooled chillers).
And seeing as hyperscale data centers usually use between 20-50 megawatts per data center, and there’s three of them in Colon, that’s like at least 240 million gallons of water a year.
The only way I can imagine a data center “consuming” water is by evaporative cooling. Querétaro is dry country, where this should work well, so that makes sense.
Most data centers evaporative cooling from what I understand, and according to This
And seeing as hyperscale data centers usually use between 20-50 megawatts per data center, and there’s three of them in Colon, that’s like at least 240 million gallons of water a year.
Yikes.