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The intense heat wave sweeping through the United States is disrupting the nation’s electricity and water supply, prompting public support to quickly expand AI data centers, which consume large amounts of electricity and water.
The climate change comes at a time when the US is rushing to build thousands of new AI data centers to support the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. Regulatory agencies, regulators, and policy makers have increasingly warned that the pace of construction is outpacing the growth of the country’s electricity and water infrastructure.
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Across the political spectrum, lawmakers are calling for increased oversight of data centers. Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for a ban on data construction in rural areas during a campaign stop on Tuesday. A former Texas governor has previously said that data centers should generate their own energy and reuse water.
Meanwhile, on the left, politicians, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, called for an end to the construction of a new data center.
Pushing back on data center infrastructure is a popular place to be. Seven out of 10 Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their communities, according to a recent Gallup poll, and half of them cite excessive use, including electricity and water, as a major concern.
Data centers consume 4 percent of US electricity. This is expected to rise to 9 percent by 2030, according to the US Department of Energy.
The heatwave that has engulfed much of the US is testing the power of the nation, which is under severe pressure from extreme weather.
“The temperature of the fire shows that the current form and cooling is designed to be moderate, and almost everything is disappearing with each passing day,” Arif Gasilov, managing partner of environmental & environmental practices at Gasilov Group, told Al Jazeera.
Power providers see this.
On the east coast of the US, PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, asked the US Department of Energy to order data centers to switch on backup generators within 15 minutes of an emergency notification warning them to do so. PJM, which operates grids in 13 states and the nation’s capital, said this would free up electricity for commercial customers.
The energy provider requested that the changes be made in the so-called temperature zone of the eastern part of the East Sea, the temperature should exceed 38.9 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in Washington, DC and 37.7 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) in New York. In Central Park, temperatures are expected to hit the hottest point not seen in the park in more than a decade.
In the US, most data centers are located in the South and Midwest, and 38 percent of Americans live within five miles (eight kilometers) of one of the 3,000 data centers currently operating, according to Pew Research.
At ideal temperatures, data center cooling systems alone account for 40 percent of electricity use in normal weather, but this increases as temperatures rise, which is happening across the board as a result of climate change, according to Gasilov.
Data centers are already driving global warming by creating so-called heat islands around them. A study by the University of Cambridge found that temperatures increased by about 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and up to 9.2 degrees Celsius (16.3 degrees Fahrenheit) near the data center.
Experts believe that this heat wave is an example of the stress on the electrical grid that will be stronger and harder to break in the coming years as the spread of water and the power of AI data centers increases.
The pressure increases beyond the temperature of the dome.
Utilities across the country have warned that demand for electricity is growing for the first time in decades after years of quiet use. This massive increase is being driven by AI data centers, transportation electrification, and new manufacturing facilities, forcing providers to slow the retirement of aging industries while accelerating investment in new generation and transmission systems.
This pressure is already beginning to mount on commercial and residential customers around the US. Earlier this year, about 50,000 California customers near Lake Tahoe were told to find an electric utility provider amid a flurry of data-driven efforts.
In Virginia, Henrico County, which has 37 data centers, asked schools to reduce energy use amid the need for the power grid, according to emails obtained by technology publication 404 Media.
Virginia as a whole leads the nation in the number of data centers, with 398 currently operating and another 287 planned. This is followed by Texas, with 296 open and another 170 planned.
A typical hyperscale data center requires between 100 and 300 megawatts of electricity. This is enough to power 300,000 US homes, or a city of about 750,000 people based on household size. This is comparable to the number of cities like Nashville in Tennessee, Charlotte in North Carolina or Edmonton in Alberta, Canada.
Combined, data centers in the US consume about 176 terawatt-hours each year, enough to power about 16 million homes, or power for about 40 million people, about the same as the people of Canada or California, or the cities of Jakarta in Indonesia or Dhaka in Bangladesh, which are the two most populous cities in the world.
This is also putting pressure on water systems, many of which are already strained.
Water pressure
The need for water in data centers increases in hot weather because cooling systems are needed to keep computer servers cool in order to function properly. Most of the products do not circulate water. About 80 percent of the drinking water used for cooling data evaporates.
“If a facility is using water cooling during a fire, it is using the same water that was previously discharged and that is often prohibited,” said Gasilov.
Meanwhile, the average water use of the data is less at 627 million gallons (2.85 billion liters) per day compared to the use of cattle at 137 billion liters (623 billion liters), steel industry at 1.8 billion (8.2 billion liters) and domestic use at 23.3 billion liters (104 billion liters).
As the need for AI grows, so too does industry’s water use. This issue is compounded by the fact that the spread of data centers increases significantly in areas affected by water: two-thirds of the new data centers that are built or are being developed from 2022 will be located in areas facing water scarcity.
One large AI data center can consume up to 5 million gallons (18.9 million liters) of water per day. This demand rises during the hottest part of the year – precisely when many areas are facing water shortages.
“The cooling of the data center depends on the water – and again – this will come at a time when the supply may be very low in the region. This is a problem of circulation in this region, not a problem of the weather,” Alex MacColl, EMEA project manager of Datamove, a data reduction service based in the UK, told Al Jazeera.
A large data center can also use as much water as a city of 50,000 people every day, according to the Environmental and Energy Institute, and about 15 percent of the total population of Corpus Christi, Texas, where local and state officials are worried that the city will soon run out of clean drinking water. There are currently three data centers in the greater Corpus Christi area, although one claims to use “zero water”.
Some of its reservoirs are less than 10 percent because the region has been in a drought for the past five years. According to a report from the Austin American-Statesman, local officials believe the planned data center an hour north has delayed emergency water supply plans for the Texas coastal city.
