Data center's thirst for water/electricity vs. individual's utility bill

Straining power grids, water supplies, and communities.

Disclaimer

I personally do not advocate any process or procedure contained in any of my Blogs. Information presented here is not intended to provide legal or lawful advice, nor medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, cure, or prevent any disease. Views expressed are for educational purposes only.

I surround, protect, purify and make harmless the following in-formation.

Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It’s in Your Electric Bill

Thirst for water and electricity

By Felicity Barringer
Apr 08, 2025

Driving around cities and small towns of the West, one of the most consequential changes to the landscape is hard to see. Data centers, buildings of the future, are usually low-slung, their large bulk is best seen from above. A drone’s-eye view shows a spreading, warehouse-flat landscape born of the economic and electrical revolution reshaping places like Phoenix, the city of Santa Clara in Silicon Valley, or rural Oregon towns close to the Columbia River.

Heat is the enemy of data operations

Heat reduces their efficiency or even makes them inoperable. What creates the heat? Armies of servers gobbling up vast amounts of electricity. What cools it? A variety of technologies, with one, evaporative cooling, requiring significant amounts of water.

This onrushing electronic future means areas of the West seeking to accumulate data centers need more and more electricity. The growth of artificial intelligence, which uses larger and more complex chips needing far more power, only accelerates the power demand. More transmission lines are needed to get power to the centers. The share of states’ and communities’ energy consumed by data centers has grown dramatically: In Arizona, they use 7.4 percent of the state’s power, in Oregon 11.4 percent, according to Visual Capitalist.

It’s not just electricity that is needed by these centers, now growing to brobdingnagian sizes to accommodate AI’s computing demands. They need significant amounts of water to keep cool, and new ones will need more. The new computer chips designed to produce artificial intelligence, like Nvidia’s Blackwell chip, use far more electricity and therefore need more cooling than the older generation of chips.

Red Canary magazine recently reported the water demand of nearly 60 centers in Phoenix is about 177 million gallons a day – significant, but a fraction of the water used in local agriculture. All told, centers are reshaping local grids, plumbing, and politics.

’Hyperscale‘ centers drive increasing power consumption

The new hyperscale data centers are a different animal from their predecessors. A decade ago, an average data center used 20 megawatt hours of power a month, about 20 times the use of an average home. The newest generation of large-scale data center campuses that support artificial intelligence with its large energy-consuming chips can use 100 or more megawatt hours a month, or five times their predecessors. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s recent report said that data centers used 4.4 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2022 and would use 6.7 to 12 percent by 2028.

Live links and more https://andthewest.stanford.edu/2025/thirsty-for-power-and-water-ai-crunching-data-centers-sprout-across-the-west/

Canada Data Centers

We currently have 285 data centers listed, from 33 markets in Canada (Canada). Click on a market below, to explore its data center locations. https://www.datacentermap.com/canada/

Big Tech’s race to dominate a future built on AI

These data centers are extremely resource-intensive; the largest can consume as much power as a city and up to several million gallons of water a day. Collectively, BI estimates, US data centers could soon consume more electricity than Poland, with a population of 36.6 million, used in 2023. Federal estimates expect data center power demand to as much as triple over the next three years.

This surging electricity demand is driving utilities to torpedo renewable energy goals and rely on fossil fuels, pushing data centers’ air-pollution-related estimated public health costs to between $5.7 billion and $9.2 billion annually. Despite the centers’ enormous water needs, tech companies have located 40% of them in areas with high water scarcity. Cities and states give away millions in tax breaks to build data centers, with relatively few full-time jobs promised in return — and locals are left living next to industrial complexes that operate 24/7.

Watch the documentary to accompany Business Insider’s “The True Cost of Data Centers” series. https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-data-center-development-true-cost-environmental-impact-2025-6

Solution - inner refinement

As A Man Thinketh
James Allen

THIS little volume (the result of meditation and experience) is not intended as an exhaustive treatise on the much-written-upon subject of the power of thought. It is suggestive rather than explanatory, its object being to stimulate men and women to the discovery and perception of the truth that “They themselves are makers of themselves” by virtue of the thoughts which they choose and encourage; that mind is the master-weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance, and that, as they may have hitherto woven in ignorance and pain they may now weave in enlightenment and happiness. JAMES ALLEN Broad Park Avenue, lljracombe, England. https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/asmanthinketh00alleiala/asmanthinketh00alleiala.pdf

Without prejudice and without recourse
Doreen Agostino
Our Greater Destiny Blog
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