When Samuel Coleridge wrote, “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink” in his epic poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” he was affirming what we all know: Water is pretty important, and it’s a scarce resource. In the same way that water was a scarce, life-giving resource for the 18th century sailors in Coleridge’s poem, water is a precious resource for the operations of most data centers. As our industry focuses more on sustainability, we should respect that scarcity of this resource by using water more wisely.
This should be a core principle of data center sustainability. After all, sustainability is about more than just green power. Although data center water usage has always been a consideration within the sustainability equation, the consumption of water by data centers using water-based cooling is under increasing scrutiny due to the increasing size of today’s hyperscale locations. To better understand the issue, let’s look at how much H2O the average water-based cooling data center actually uses. It’s estimated the average 1-MW data center uses 7 million gallons of water annually, and usage only increases with size, as a 15-MW facility is estimated to use approximately 131 million gallons annually. No matter how you look at it, that’s a lot of water.