New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order this week imposing the first state moratorium in the United States on hyperscale data centers, those that house hundreds of computer servers and consume large amounts of water and energy. With some 4,300 facilities, the US It concentrates around 40% of all those on the planet. They follow him United Kingdom, Germany and France, which add up to 5% of the total, and China, whose official data is distrusted.
Data centers are not popular at the moment in the country. Every week the press reports on some local protest movement against the installation of these critical infrastructures for the digital universe and the use of data, and basic for generative AI. The high consumption of water and electricity is the focus of the debate and confronts the political parties. Donald Trump’s administration has gone so far as to warn states not to impose regulations on the AI industry so as not to limit job growth and, above all, so as not to give ground to China.
It’s not just consumption, the fear of contamination is also gaining importance, especially since a few days ago the Meta data center in Cheyenne (Wyoming) hit the international media for the release of a rare bacteria called “Cupriavidus gilardii” to the public sewage network, capable of causing pneumonia in immunocompromised people. It was detected in wastewater and non-potable water, the company defends itself, but local authorities have, for the moment, stopped its discharge permits. In addition, a Politico publication warns of a change in the Clean Water Law that is allowing, starting in 2023, new data centers to be built without a federal water pollution permit if the streams and wetlands on which it is discharged are outside the scope of the law.
Alberto Jáñez, director of the Executive Program in Data Center Management at Comillas-Onexed and director of Engineering at Conurma Ingenieros, considers that this is an isolated case. “In Spain and in the vast majority of Europe, data centers operate through closed circuits of treated and glycolated water, so the possibility of bacterial growth as the circuit is not in contact with air is very low.” It is the difference with USA, where in most cases cooling is carried out through open water circuits. “This comes into contact with the air continuously and is at favorable temperatures for microbial growth,” says Jáñez.
How much water do they consume?
According to the Florida Association of Water and Pollution Control Operators (a non-profit professional organization), “most modern data centers use water-based cooling. This often involves cooling towers or evaporative coolers: water absorbs heat drawn from the rooms where the servers are located and is then cooled by evaporation in a tower. As it evaporates into the air, it carries away heat, reducing the energy needed for cooling. The toll is high water consumption. According to data from the entity, 75-90% of data centers around the world rely on water cooling and “in the vast majority of the oldest and largest existing ones it is by evaporation through open circuit.”
Although the global trend is to opt for closed water circuits, as Jáñez points out, the consumption of water and electricity in these infrastructures is very worrying. A few days ago, the UN Secretary General demanded transparency from AI companies to reveal the impact of their data centers. “By 2030 they could consume more energy than all but five countries, and enough water to meet the needs of the 1.3 billion people of sub-Saharan Africa for a year”he said during London Climate Action Week.
Luis García Valverde, member of Ecologistas en Acción, agrees by pointing out that “this is what worries us most: the opacity and lack of supervision of these industries. These companies do not present their consumption data, neither energy nor water, not even in Spain.
During Christmas 2024, he and his partner Aurora Gómez reviewed the extensive documentation of the large Amazon project in Aragon and have taken the Amazon Web Services General Interest Project to trial in the CC AA. «There is a European directive that requires that there be a national data registry in each EU Member State, but this does not exist yet. “There is a lack of transparency,” says García, who also remembers that thanks to their investigations they discovered and made public that AWS has requested a 48% increase in the water consumption initially planned. In the province of Zaragoza alone, his team has counted 28 projects. «We can see nearby experiences such as that of Ireland, one of the European countries in which a moratorium on the installation of new centers that already account for 21% of the country’s energy. Protests are taking place throughout Europe and Spain should take advantage of what we already know. The Talavera de la Reina de Meta project arrived here from the Netherlands. It was called Project Tulipán and the farmers stopped it,” says Jáñez.
Electricity
As you can see, electricity is the other big concern. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the electrical expenditure of these centers worldwide will double by 2030, going from 415 TWh in 2024 to 945 TWh in 2030. They already account for 1.5% of global consumption and, in four years, they will reach 3%, somewhat more than Japan’s current consumption. For Alberto Jáñez, “it is true that data centers are large consumers of electrical energy, but it is important to put this consumption in context: it responds to the constant growth in demand for data, cloud services and the digitalization of the economy. Currently, there is a very important challenge when it comes to managing electrical networks with the implementation of new data centers dedicated to AI, compared to traditional centers that host company servers or cloud services. The latter have a more or less constant and much more predictable energy demand. The final objective, in my opinion, is to optimize this consumption through hybrid systems through renewable energies and store the surpluses in Battery Systems (BESS) so that consumption peaks can be assumed locally,” he comments.
The technician also remembers that other systems will arrive, “such as those that currently exist mainly in the countries of northern Europe, which They take advantage of the residual heat extracted from server rooms to use it in urban heating networks (district heating), in order to serve as support for town heating systems, etc.”, explains Alberto Jáñez.
The best location
►Tycoon Elon Musk plans to take these data centers into space in 2028. It is one of the ideas being used to find favorable locations that are less subject to consumption, legislation or social rejection problems. They would be powered by solar energy, but the challenges in solving air conditioning in space raise doubts about the technical viability of the proposal and whether it will not just be a commercial maneuver.
Before space, data centers will reach the bottom of the sea. In fact, Microsoft has already tested one in Scotland. The Panthalassa firm, backed by Peter Thiel, already has a prototype, the Ocean-2, which it has tested off the coast of Washington; and Samsung wants to develop its own floating centers by 2028. “It is true that there are more ideal places than, for example, Talavera de la Reina where there is already a drought, but for us these futuristic ideas are just a way to divert the debate,” says Luis García.