US datacenters tripled their water footprint in 10 years
... and those are figures from the start of the AI boom. It can only be worse now. Silo-ed reporting isn't helping
Datacenters in America used about 17 billion gallons of water during 2023, triple the amount they used a decade earlier in 2014, according to an estimate from US Congressional Research Service (CRS).
In a recent report published by the Library of Congress, the CRS casts an eye over how server farms use water, looks at potential options to reduce this, and discusses the current federal role in overseeing the use of H2O by operators.
The CRS notes the federal government does not systematically assess all water use by the industry - part of the problem is that water usage data is often collected by state-level bodies.
Sudden upswing
The report says the AI craze has led to a massive surge in datacenter construction since OpenAI released ChatGPT...
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