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Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Quantifying and Addressing the Impact of Data Centers on Public Water Systems

Yuelin Han, Pengfei Li, Adam Wierman, Shaolei Ren

Abstract

Water is a critical resource for data centers and an efficient means of cooling. However, meeting the growing water demand of data centers requires substantial peak water withdrawals, which many communities in the United States cannot supply, especially during the hottest days of the year. This largely overlooked water capacity constraint is emerging as a bottleneck for data centers and can force operators to rely on less efficient dry cooling, further stressing the power grid during summer peaks. In this paper, we focus on the direct water withdrawal of U.S. data centers for cooling and examine their impacts on public water systems. Our analysis indicates that, if the 2024 water use intensity persists, U.S. data centers could collectively require 697-1,451 million gallons per day (MGD) of new water capacity through 2030, comparable to New York City's average daily supply of roughly 1,000 MGD. Under an optimistic scenario with a compound annual water use intensity reduction by 10%, the water capacity demand decreases to 227-604 MGD, although high-growth IT loads could still require enough capacity to hypothetically supply about half of New York City for most of the year. The total valuation of the new water capacity is on the order of \$10 billion, reaching up to \$58 billion in the high-growth case. These impacts are highly concentrated on communities hosting data centers. Finally, we provide recommendations to address the growing water capacity demand of U.S. data centers, including reporting peak water use, developing corporate-community partnerships, adopting a Water Capacity Neutral approach (colloquially "Pipe Neutral") to allow host communities to retain limited water capacity resources, and implementing coordinated water-power planning to responsibly leverage water for peak power reduction and opportunistically utilize surplus power to mitigate impacts on public water systems.

Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Quantifying and Addressing the Impact of Data Centers on Public Water Systems

Abstract

Water is a critical resource for data centers and an efficient means of cooling. However, meeting the growing water demand of data centers requires substantial peak water withdrawals, which many communities in the United States cannot supply, especially during the hottest days of the year. This largely overlooked water capacity constraint is emerging as a bottleneck for data centers and can force operators to rely on less efficient dry cooling, further stressing the power grid during summer peaks. In this paper, we focus on the direct water withdrawal of U.S. data centers for cooling and examine their impacts on public water systems. Our analysis indicates that, if the 2024 water use intensity persists, U.S. data centers could collectively require 697-1,451 million gallons per day (MGD) of new water capacity through 2030, comparable to New York City's average daily supply of roughly 1,000 MGD. Under an optimistic scenario with a compound annual water use intensity reduction by 10%, the water capacity demand decreases to 227-604 MGD, although high-growth IT loads could still require enough capacity to hypothetically supply about half of New York City for most of the year. The total valuation of the new water capacity is on the order of \58 billion in the high-growth case. These impacts are highly concentrated on communities hosting data centers. Finally, we provide recommendations to address the growing water capacity demand of U.S. data centers, including reporting peak water use, developing corporate-community partnerships, adopting a Water Capacity Neutral approach (colloquially "Pipe Neutral") to allow host communities to retain limited water capacity resources, and implementing coordinated water-power planning to responsibly leverage water for peak power reduction and opportunistically utilize surplus power to mitigate impacts on public water systems.
Paper Structure (68 sections, 6 equations, 6 figures, 10 tables)

This paper contains 68 sections, 6 equations, 6 figures, 10 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Contributions.
  3. Preliminaries on U.S. Data Centers and Public Water Systems
  4. Overview of U.S. Data Centers and Water Use
  5. Data center water use.
  6. Scope 1.
  7. Scopes 2 and 3.
  8. U.S. Public Water Systems
  9. Community water systems.
  10. Capacity expansion.
  11. Water Capacity Bottleneck for Data Centers
  12. Understanding the Characteristics of Data Center Water Use
  13. How Data Centers Use Water Differently from Other Users
  14. High consumptive ratio
  15. High peaking factor
  16. ...and 53 more sections

Figures (6)

  • Figure 1: (a) Monthly WUE of a data center with 34.5 MW IT capacity in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2019 Water_DataCenterEnergy_Tradeoff_Arizona_Real_Measurement_WUE_Monthly_2022_KARIMI2022106194; (b) Monthly PUE and WUE comparisons of two data centers in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2019 (one with 54 MW IT capacity using dry coolers, and another one with 34.5 MW IT capacity using cooling towers) Water_DataCenterEnergy_Tradeoff_Arizona_Real_Measurement_WUE_Monthly_2022_KARIMI2022106194; (c) Consumptive ratios of selected companies and data center sites in Table \ref{['tab:dc_metrics_2024']}. The site-level consumptive ratios are for a large technology company's U.S. data center fleet, excluding air-cooled sites.
  • Figure 2: Water use data collected from the monthly financial reports of West Des Monies Water Works available at Water_WestDesMoines_IA_Website. (a) Monthly water use of a hyperscale data center in West Des Moines, Iowa; (b) The ratio of the data center's water use to the total of 20 largest water users served by West Des Moines Water Works; (c) Monthly peaking factors (i.e., ratio of the maximum monthly water use to the average use between 2022 and 2025) of all the large water users counted by West Des Moines Water Works.
  • Figure 3: Annual water withdrawal in billion gallons (BG) under Reference, Baseline, Moderate, and Optimistic scenarios, 2024–2030. For Baseline, Moderate, and Optimistic scenarios, dark and light shades represent hyperscale and colocation data centers, respectively. The dashed line indicates total water withdrawal for Reference (LBNL).
  • Figure 4: Annual water consumption in billion gallons (BG) under the Reference, Baseline, Moderate, and Optimistic scenarios from 2024 to 2030. For the Baseline, Moderate, and Optimistic scenarios, dark and light shades represent hyperscale and colocation data centers, respectively. The dashed line indicates the result for Reference (LBNL).
  • Figure 5: Valuation of the new water infrastructure capacity to meet U.S. data centers' new peak water demand from 2024 to 2030 under different scenarios for low, mid, and high growth projections.
  • ...and 1 more figures

Theorems & Definitions (2)

  • Definition 1: pWUE
  • Definition 2: WCI