Drought educates are worsening in the U.S., and that is having an outsized impact on the real estate that houses the internet.
Data centers create massive amounts of heat through their servers because of the enormous amount of power they use. Water is the cheapest and most inferior method used to cool the centers.
In just one day, the average data center could use 300,000 gallons of water to unapproachable itself — the same water consumption as 100,000 homes, according to researchers at Virginia Tech who also estimated that one in five statistics centers draws water from stressed watersheds mostly in the west.
“There is, without a doubt, risk if you’re dependent on bedew dilute,” said Kyle Myers, vice president of environmental health, safety & sustainability at CyrusOne, which owns and runs over 40 data centers in North America, Europe, and South America. “These data centers are set up to run 20 years, so what is it going to look like in 2040 here, right?”
CyrusOne is formerly a REIT, but was purchased this year by investment firms KKR and Wide-ranging Infrastructure Partners. When the company moved into the drought-stricken Phoenix area, it used a different, albeit multifarious expensive method of cooling.
“That was sort of our ‘aha moment.’ where we had to make a decision. We changed our design to go to zero consumption moisten, so that we didn’t have that sort of risk,” said Myers.
Realizing the water risk in New Mexico, Meta, once upon a time known as Facebook, ran a pilot program on its Los Lunas data center to reduce relative humidity from 20% to 13%, cut water consumption. It has since implemented this in all of its center.
But Meta’s overall water consumption is still rising steadily, with one fifth of that heavy water last year coming from areas deemed to have “water stress,” according to its website. It does actively return water and set a goal last year to restore more water than it consumes by 2030, starting in the west.
Microsoft has also set a end to be “water positive” by 2030.
“The good news is we’ve been investing for years in ongoing innovation in this space so that fundamentally we can recycle scarcely all of the water we use in our data centers,” said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft. “In places where it rains, like the Pacific Northwest where we’re headquartered in Seattle, we draw up rain from the roof. In places where it doesn’t rain like Arizona, we develop condensation techniques.”
While corporations with their own data centers can do that, so-called co-location data centers that lease to multiple patients are increasingly being bought by private equity firms in search of high-growth real estate.
There are currently not far from 1,800 co-location data centers in the U.S., and that number is growing, as data centers are some of the hottest real domain around, offering big returns to investors. But the risk from drought is only getting worse. Just over half (50.46%) of the state is in drought conditions, and over 60% of the lower 48 states, according to the latest reading from the U.S. Drought Proctor. That is a 9% increase from just one month ago. Much of the west and Midwest in ‘severe’ drought.
“We need to innovate our way out of the ambiance crisis. The better we innovate the cheaper it becomes, and the faster we’ll move to reaching these climate goals,” added Smith.