Beyond Energy, There's Also This: One Large-Scale Data Center Can Use The Water Used By A City Of Up To 60,000 People
Illinois is already a top destination for data centers, and more are coming. One small Chicago suburb alone has approved one large complex and has proposals for two more. Once they’re online, data centers require a lot of electricity, which is helping drive rates up around the country and grabbing headlines. What gets less attention is how much water they need, both to generate that electricity and dissipate the heat from the servers powering cloud computing, storage and artificial intelligence.
A high-volume “hyperscale” data center uses the same amount of water in a year as 12,000 to 60,000 people, said Helena Volzer, a senior source water policy manager for the environmental nonprofit Alliance for the Great Lakes. Increasingly, residents, legislators and freshwater advocacy groups are calling for municipalities to more carefully consider where the water that supplies these data centers will come from and how it will be managed. Even in the water-rich Great Lakes region, those are important questions as erratic weather patterns fueled by climate change affect water resources.
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Much of the water used in data centers never gets back into the watershed, particularly if the data center uses a method called evaporative cooling. Even if that water does go back into the ecosystem, deep bedrock aquifers, like the Mahomet in central Illinois, can take centuries to recharge. In the Great Lakes, just 1 percent of the water is renewed each year from rain, runoff and groundwater. “You have to think of [water] as a bank account. What is the input? What is the output? What is your nest egg in there? And how fast are you drawing it down?” said Carrie Jennings, the research and policy director at Freshwater Society. “That’s where groundwater governance, your Illinois State Water Survey and your empowered local groups that have the right data to work with can think about managing this system.”
In Illinois, 40 percent of the population gets its water from aquifers. In some places, like Chicago’s southwest suburbs in Will and Kendall counties, the amount of water in those aquifers is dwindling. To ensure that they can supply citizens with safe drinking water, officials from six suburbs southwest of Chicago—Joliet, Channahon, Crest Hill, Minooka, Romeoville and Shorewood—made an agreement with the city two years ago to buy millions of gallons of water a day from Lake Michigan. They are currently building a $1.5 billion pipeline to transport the water, which is expected to be completed by 2030.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16062025/illinois-data-centers-water-use/