Thanks Patrick Regan for sharing this NPR show on water & data centres. It’s well done, very informative and a great reason we need public service broadcasting!
One thing I think gets lost in these numbers of ‘billions of gallons per year’, is context and relativity.
Google annual data centre water use, at
6.4 billion gallons per year, is 67,000 m3 per day. That’s the water demand of 335,000 people (at 200l/p/day). That’s 0.1% of the US population. And that’s just residential water use! Industrial and commercial water use, is over 2X that. Agricultural, over 5X it.
We once had Keynote speaker, NASA Chief Scientist, Dennis Bushnell tell us all at BlueTech Forum ‘you are not solving water, you are playing in the water’. He was a futurist and big picture thinker with an extraordinary mind who both scared us and challenged us to widen the aperture.
Tech is a tiny subset of Industrial and Municipal water, today a rounding error towards zero.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon’s combined revenue, relative to their total water use, is 1,000X that of a F&B company like The Coca-Cola Company. We call this the ‘relative value of water indice’. Tech will solve this, its not a wicked problem, which is good news, as it means it will get solved. Partly through advances in efficient cooling design and partly through tangential projects.
Amazon is a leader, at 0.18 litres per kW hour with advances in direct evaporative cooling design. Check out the excellent podcast on The Essential molecule with Tom Ferguson and Will Hewes. https://lnkd.in/eWtFQ5_4
Great team here including Kara H. Hurst.
The tangential pathways require Tech to ‘move fast and restore water ways’.
Google quadrupled its water replenishment in 2024, compared to 2023. Kudos to Tara Varghese, Kate Brandt and team.
Microsoft is moving at what is effectively warp speed in the context of the water sector to forge radical collaborations with water tech and water utilities, creating lighthouse projects and moving the needle. Kudos to Eliza Roberts , Paulina Concha Larrauri and Microsoft team.
Apple just launched an eagerly anticipated and first of its kind, Water Strategy Plan, and again shout out to Laura Meadors, and a wider water team across the company including Suseela Akella Fumie Koike
https://lnkd.in/etb5PiEP
Intel Corporation is ahead of its own ambitious water goals and timelines and we discussed with Vanessa Lanas Medina what post 2030 targets could look like at the Nike BlueTech Forum workshop.
So tech is moving, and even if the absolute quantities of water are relatively small when compared to overall quantities of water use, that’s not what’s important, it’s the very fact that these companies are showing what can be done, that’s important.
To join BlueTech Research Briefing on Water and Data Centres led by Vishal Wagholikar, PhD contact Lily Chen
