Data Centres and Ground Water
Many years ago, in India there was a concern that the soft drink beverage companies were depleting the ground water levels. This was not acceptable in regions with drought or low water tables/resevoirs.
In California, ground water accounts for 40% of the State's annual supply and 60% during drought. I have been sadly watching the horrific pictures of the fires in California. There are 68 data centers in Los Angeles (288 in the California out of 3065 in USA). We do know the impact of these centers on water levels and global warming. I would like to stress offsetting is now enough, we just need to reduce consumption. The more advanced the GPUs get (NVIDIA's GeForce RTX GPU with 92 billion transistors can do 3,352 trillion AI operations per second (TOPS)), the more data we need (which leads to us creating synthetic data), hence the more processing power, more electricity, more storage ---- it is a vicious cycle. I am not suggesting a correlations between the two but policies do need to consider multiple factors in areas subject to climate change.
Here are some interesting facts: A data center (like Google, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, Micorsoft etc.) can use upto 450,000 gallons of water per day ( equivalent to the daily water consumption of about 1,500 U.S. households, according to the EPA)
Interactive map of ground water levels here: https://sgma.water.ca.gov/CalGWLive/#groundwater
By deepest sympathies for the people who have lost homes, livelihoods and families.
Comments