Google promises to return more water than it consumes in data centers by 2030

Aerial view of a data center owned by the American multinational and technology company Google in Santiago
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Google announced, this Wednesday (3), a plan to reduce the impact on the water used to cool its data centers, including those that operate with artificial intelligence.
The plan is divided into five stages. The first is the most ambitious and plans to replace more water than is consumed in cooling data centers by 2030, at least in the United States.
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To achieve this goal, the company states that it will increase the number of projects aimed at water management in the regions where its data centers are located and in nearby river basins. According to Google, the expansion of these projects involves an investment of US$17 million, around R$86.1 million in direct conversion.
Other steps include supporting the modernization of water supply and treatment systems in these cities. "These include projects ranging from reinforcing local supplies to detecting leaks in pipes," Google said in a statement.
A more detailed analysis of watersheds for new data centers is also among the proposals. In the document, Google states that, if the use of water poses a risk to the environment or local supply, it will adopt air cooling or reuse water cooling.
Why do data centers use so much energy and water?
Operating a data center requires a complex energy structure so that all equipment works and is adequately cooled.
As they can be used by millions of people, these spaces must be open 24 hours a day. To ensure this, companies adopt generators and even their own power substations.
Training the best-known AI models involves a huge volume of data and can only be done with modern processing chips, which require more energy and, therefore, heat up more.
With hotter equipment, the only way to control the temperature is to adopt a liquid cooling system, by water or oil - cloud data centers can be air-cooled because they consume less energy.
Water-cooled data centers are a concern for due to high consumption. Asking up to 50 questions for ChatGPT can consume half a liter of water, according to a study by the University of California, Riverside.
Brazil has around 180 data centers in operation. None of them are focused on artificial intelligence, but four projects of this type have already been announced in the country. They could have energy consumption equivalent to that of 16.4 million homes - find out more about the projects.
How a data center works from the inside
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