“In the extreme case, at the end of the century, that’s pretty much all of winter,” says Sean McKenna, executive director of hydrologic sciences at the Desert Research Institute, a research division of the Nevada System of Higher Education.
That loss will undermine an essential function of the Sierra snowpack: reliably delivering water to farmers and cities when it’s most needed in the spring and summer, across both Nevada and California.
These shifting conditions will require the region to develop better ways to store, preserve, and recycle the water it does get, McKenna says. Northern Nevada’s cities, towns, and agencies will also need to carefully evaluate and plan for the collective impacts of continuing growth and development on the interconnected water system, particularly when it comes to water-hungry projects like data centers, he adds.
“We can’t consider each of these as a one-off, without considering that there may be tens or dozens of these in the next 15 years,” McKenna says.
Thirsty data centers
Data centers suck up water in two main ways.
As giant rooms of server racks process information and consume energy, they generate heat that must be shunted away to prevent malfunctions and damage to the equipment. The processing units optimized for training and running AI models often draw more electricity and, in turn, produce more heat.
To keep things cool, more and more data centers have turned to liquid cooling systems that don’t need as much electricity as fan cooling or air-conditioning.
These often rely on water to absorb heat and transfer it to outdoor cooling towers, where much of the moisture evaporates. Microsoft’s US data centers, for instance, could have directly evaporated nearly 185,000 gallons of “clean freshwater” in the course of training OpenAI’s GPT-3 large language model, according to a 2023 preprint study led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside. (The research has since been peer-reviewed and is awaiting publication.)
What’s less appreciated, however, is that the larger data-center drain on water generally occurs indirectly, at the power plants generating extra electricity for the turbocharged AI sector. These facilities, in turn, require more water to cool down equipment, among other purposes.
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