Critics Slam Amazon’s ‘Waterproof’ Vow As Data Centers Squeeze Local Services

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Earlier this year, e-commerce company Amazon received approval to open two data centers in Santiago, Chile. The $400 million deal is the company’s first step in locating its data centers, which consume large amounts of electricity and water to power cloud computing services and Internet systems, in Latin America — and in one of the world’s most water-stressed countries, where residents have protested against the industry’s expansion.

This week, the tech giant made a separate but related announcement. It plans to invest in water conservation along the Maipo River, which is the main source of water in the Santiago region. Amazon will partner with a water technology startup to help farmers near the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 hectares of farmland. The system is poised to save enough water to power nearly 300 homes a year, and is part of Amazon’s drive to make its cloud computing operations “water-friendly” by 2030, meaning the company’s web services division will save or replenish more water than it uses. up.

The reason for this water system is clear: Data centers need a lot of water to cool their servers, and Amazon plans to spend $100 billion to build more of them over the next decade as part of a big bet on its Amazon Web Services cloud- computing platform. Other technology companies such as Microsoft and Meta, which are also investing in data centers to develop artificial intelligence, have made similar water pledges amid growing controversy over the sector’s thirst for water and energy.

Amazon says its data centers are already among the most water-efficient in the industry, and it plans to roll out conservation projects to reduce its drought. However, like corporate promises to reach “net-zero” emissions, these water promises are more complex than they first appear. While the company has indeed taken steps to reduce water use at its facilities, its figures do not account for the huge water needs of the power plants that keep the lights on in those same facilities. Without a greater commitment to reducing Amazon’s pressure on power grids, the company’s conservation efforts and tech giants will only address part of the problem, according to experts who spoke to Grist.

Powerful servers in large data centers run hot as they process unprecedented amounts of information, and keeping them from overheating requires both water and electricity. Rather than trying to keep these rooms cool with conventional air-conditioning units, many companies use water as collateral, passing it through the servers to cool them. Institutions also require large amounts of electricity to run all their servers: They already account for about 3 percent of US energy demand, a number that could more than double by 2030. In addition, coal, gas, and nuclear industries. that produce electricity themselves use even more water to stay cool.

Will Hewes, who leads water sustainability at Amazon Web Services, told Grist that the company uses water in its data centers to save on wind energy units, thereby reducing its reliance on fossil fuels.

“Using water for cooling in many places really reduces the amount of energy we use, so it helps us meet other sustainability goals,” he said. “We could always decide not to use water for cooling, but we want to, a lot, because of those energy and efficiency benefits.”

To save on energy costs, corporate data centers must evaporate millions of liters of water per year. It’s hard to say for sure how much water the data center industry uses, but the ballpark estimates are huge. Another 2021 study found that US data centers consumed nearly 415,000 acres of water in 2018, even before the artificial intelligence boom. That’s enough to supply about half a million homes every year, or about as much as California’s Imperial Valley takes from the Colorado River each year to grow winter vegetables. Another study found that data centers operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta withdrew twice as much water from rivers and groundwater as the entire country of Denmark.

It is almost certain that this number has become even higher in recent years as companies have built more facilities to keep up with the development of artificial intelligence, as AI programs such as ChatGPT require a large amount of server real estate. Technology companies have built hundreds of new data centers in the past few years alone, and are planning hundreds more. One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized water bottle for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides. On-site water usage in any of these corporate data centers can now rival that of a large beverage company like PepsiCo.

Amazon does not provide statistics on its absolute water usage; Hewes told Grist that the company is “focused on efficiency.” However, the tech giant’s water consumption is probably lower than some of its competitors – partly because the company has built many of its data centers with so-called evaporative cooling systems, which require much less water than other cooling technologies and only turn on there. temperatures rise dramatically. The company keeps its water usage at about 10 percent of the industry average, and in cooler climates like Sweden, it doesn’t use any water to cool data centers except in high summer temperatures.

Companies can reduce the environmental impact of their AI business by building them in cool, water-rich environments, but they must balance those efficiency concerns with concerns about land and electricity costs, and the need to be close to major customers. A recent study found that water use in the data center in the US is “shown in underwater barrels” in places like the Southwest, but Amazon has concentrated most of its business far to the east, especially in Virginia, with cheap energy and financial incentives for technology. firms.

“A lot of places are driven by customer needs, but also [prices for] houses and power,” said Hewes. “Some large parts of our data center are in less hot areas, not in high water stress areas. Virginia, Ohio – it’s hot in the summer, but then there are big chunks of the year when we don’t have to use water for cooling.” Still, the company’s expansion into Virginia is already causing concerns about water availability.

To reduce its impacts on such barrels, the company also sponsors a number of storage and recharge projects such as the one in Chile. It donates recycled water from its data centers to farmers, who use it to irrigate their crops, and has helped restore rivers that supply water-strapped cities such as Cape Town, South Africa; in northern Virginia, has worked to install a cover crop farm that can reduce runoff pollution in local waterways. The company treats these projects the way other companies treat carbon offsets, counting every gallon recharged for every gallon it uses in its data centers. Amazon said in its latest sustainability report that it is 41 percent of the way to meeting its goal of being “water.” In other words, it has financing programs that recharge or save more than 4 liters of water for every 10 liters of water it uses.

But despite all this, the company’s water management policy does not include the water consumed by the power plants that supply its data centers. This use can be three to 10 times as much as water use in a data center environment, according to Shaolei Ren, an engineering professor at the University of California, Riverside, who studies data center water use. As an example, Ren pointed to an Amazon data center in Pennsylvania that relies on a nuclear power plant less than a mile away. That data center uses about 20 percent of the power plant’s capacity.

“They say they use very little water, but there’s a lot of water evaporation going on right next door, and that’s to power their data center,” he said.

Companies like Amazon can reduce this secondary water use by relying on renewable energy sources, which don’t require anywhere near as much water as traditional power plants. Hewes says the company has been trying to “manage” both water and power needs with a unique goal of using 100 percent renewable energy, but Ren points out that the company’s data centers require nighttime power, meaning it’s available intermittently. renewables like solar and wind farms can only go so far.

Amazon is not the only company facing this problem. CyrusOne, another large data center company, revealed in its sustainability report earlier this year that it used eight times as much water to generate energy as it did on-site in its data centers.

“As long as we rely on grid electricity that includes thermal power sources to power our facilities, we are indirectly responsible for using a lot of water when producing that gas,” said the report.

In terms of infill projects like the one in Chile, they will also go part of the way in reducing the impact of data center explosions. Even if Amazon’s cloud operation is “watery” around the world, with projects in many of the same areas where it has data centers, that doesn’t mean it won’t risk water access to certain watersheds. A company’s data centers and their power plants can still draw more water than the company fills in a given area, and filling projects in other underground areas won’t suffer the physical consequences of such overdrafts.

“If they can capture some of the rising water and purify it and return it to the community, that’s better than nothing, but I think it doesn’t reduce actual consumption,” said Ren. “It hides a lot of real problems, because water is really a regional problem.”

Fix: This story has been corrected to clarify that Amazon’s “clean water” guarantee only applies to its web services division.

This article appeared in Grist. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and a fairer future. Learn more at Grist.org.