AI has a water problem. Google thinks it has a fix

Faced with the growing backlog of AI data centers in the US, Google is stepping up its efforts to reduce environmental damage by adding water to local communities.

The company made five commitments regarding water use in the new system blog post published on Wednesday, including a goal to recover more water than it uses in its data centers by 2030. Google also said that it will invest in local water projects, identify alternative sources of water to use for its energy, and provide information on how water is used throughout the world.

“We’re one of the largest players in the space,” said Ben Townsend, global head of infrastructure and sustainability at Google. Seaside in conversation. “We think it’s very important to establish a plan that the communities can call, so if someone comes and says, ‘we want to build a data center,’ the community can say, ‘there are five things that put the community first. Are you doing this?

The offer comes in between sizes resisting rapid construction of the data center helping to power the powerful needs of AI. Google’s parent company Alphabet recently said it wants to raising $80 billion from retail sales to fund technology development. A soon Gallup poll found that more than 70 percent of Americans oppose the idea of ​​a data center being built in their community. Half of those surveyed cited the data center’s environmental impact as a reason for their opposition, including 18 percent who cited excessive water use as a problem.

AI data centers need more water to cool them, a recent study found that the technology uses as much water per year as people drink from bottled water worldwide. Google’s previous estimates of its water use on AI they have been misleadingaccording to some researchers, who say they stop using water in other ways. The increasing number of global products has led to the creation of corporate commitment reduce water use and to block the data center from raising consumer electricity prices.

But Google’s Townsend has defended the company’s reputation so far. “As much as we can, we’re accounting for that water flow,” Townsend said, “and I think we’ve made great progress in reducing or eliminating that amount of water through our non-renewable water resources.”

In a blog post, Google’s vice president of global finance Bikash Koley says that using water in data centers can reduce overall energy consumption. “In most environments, water cooling can reduce data center power consumption by about 10% compared to air cooling,” Koley writes. “Most of the water consumed in data centers is small – US data centers use less than 1% of the water that Americans use on lawns each year – but we focus on protecting local water in everything we do in the data center.”

Koley says Google will be able to recover more water than it uses in the next four years investing in projects which improves things like irrigation and infrastructure. It promises to continue to report on its annual water use and to look at alternatives such as wastewater, as it does in another part of Georgia. The company also announced $17 million in funding for new water management projects in seven states.

Those who worry about reservoirs sucking up all their water are worried, Townsend said, even though they say they may be using less water than people think. “It would be disingenuous of the space to say there are only misconceptions out there. It’s not true,” Townsend said. But, he added, the data center sector does not use as much water as people might think, and now is the time to invest to ensure that “water use in the data center is not a problem.”