Quietly but quickly, Phoenix has become one of the nation’s hotspots for a booming economic and technological phenomenon of late-stage capitalism: data centers — the boxy, sprawling farms of wire and silicon going up everywhere around the Valley.
Some of Arizona’s leaders have championed the economic benefits of the large facilities, which house networks of servers, storage devices and other equipment used to process and disseminate huge amounts of data. But others are ringing alarm bells that the cost to feed these techno-futurist factories is simply too high — and the rewards are reaped by too few.
Those alarms were underscored by a new study from environmental nonprofit Ceres that was released on Tuesday. Using the Phoenix area as a case study for analysis, the “Drained by Data: The Cumulative Impact of Data Centers on Regional Water Stress” study attempts to quantify the extensive water and electricity resources that these data centers will require. It argues that a surge of data centers — 124 that have been built or are in planning phases — could have a serious impact on the already drought-stricken Phoenix. It’s part of a larger national trend: Bloomberg has reported that about 58% of U.S. data centers are in areas with high levels of water stress…