The rapid growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing is outpacing the ability of many community water systems to deliver large bursts of water on the hottest days of the year to keep the nation’s data processing centers cool. A study posted to the arXiv preprint server by a UC Riverside research team in collaboration with Caltech found that community waterworks across the United States will need billions of dollars in new infrastructure to meet spikes in data center water demands during peak usage.
Without new water efficiencies, data center cooling systems four years from now could require 697 million to 1.45 billion gallons of additional peak water capacity per day—roughly equal to the typical daily water supply of New York City. Even with optimistic water use reductions, the new water capacity, if pooled, could rival the supply to half of New York City for most of the year.
Such water demands stem from the need to keep cool millions of servers that process our AI queries and other computing needs in a growing number of warehouse-sized data processing centers. These centers use evaporative cooling systems, which are the most energy-efficient method of cooling in many places…