Conflicts over water are as old as history itself, but the massive Google data centers on the edge of an Oregon town on the Columbia River represent an emerging 21st century concern.
Now a critical part of modern computing, data centers help people stream movies on Netflix, conduct transactions on PayPal, post updates on Facebook, store trillions of photographs and more.
However, a single facility can also churn through millions of liters of water per day to keep hot-running equipment cool.
Google wants to build at least two more data centers in The Dalles, Oregon, worrying some residents who fear there eventually would not be enough water for everyone — including for area farms and fruit orchards, which are by far the biggest users.
Across the US, there has been some mild pushback as tech companies build and expand data centers — conflicts likely to grow as water becomes a more precious resource amid the threat of climate change and as the demand for cloud computing grows.
Some tech giants have been using cutting-edge research and development to find less impactful cooling methods, but there are those who say the companies can still do more to be environmentally sustainable.
The concerns are understandable in The Dalles, the seat of Wasco County, which is suffering extreme and exceptional drought, according to the US Drought Monitor. The region last summer endured its hottest days on record, reaching 48°C in The Dalles.
The Dalles is adjacent to the mighty Columbia River, but the new data centers would not be able to use that water, and instead would have to take water from rivers and groundwater that has gone through the city’s water treatment plant.
However, the snowpack in the nearby Cascade Range that feeds the aquifers varies wildly year-to-year and glaciers are melting. Most aquifers in north-central Oregon are declining, according to the US Geological Survey Groundwater Resources Program.
Adding to the unease: The 15,000 town residents do not know how much water the proposed data centers will use, because Google calls it a trade secret. Even the town councilors, who are scheduled to vote on the proposal on Nov. 8, had to wait until this week to find out.
Dave Anderson, public works director for The Dalles, said Google obtained the rights to 14.8 million liters of water per day when it purchased land formerly home to an aluminum smelter.
Google is requesting less water for the new data centers than that amount and would transfer those rights to the city, Anderson said.
For its part, Google said that it is “committed to the long-term health of the county’s economy and natural resources.”
The US hosts 30 percent of the world’s data centers, more than any other country. Some data centers are trying to become more efficient in water consumption, for example by recycling the same water several times through a center before discharging it. Google even uses treated sewage water, instead of using drinking water as many data centers do, to cool its facility in Douglas County, Georgia.
Facebook Inc’s first data center took advantage of the cold high-desert air in Prineville, Oregon, to chill its servers, and went a step further when it built a center in Lulea, Sweden, near the Arctic Circle.
Microsoft Corp even placed a small data center, enclosed in what looks like a giant cigar, on the seafloor off Scotland. After retrieving the barnacle-encrusted container last year after two years, company employees saw improvement in overall reliability, because the servers were not subjected to temperature fluctuations and corrosion from oxygen and humidity.
Team leader Ben Cutler said the experiment shows data centers can be kept cool without tapping freshwater resources.
A study published in May by researchers at Virginia Tech and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory showed that one-fifth of data centers rely on water from moderately to highly stressed watersheds.
Tech companies typically consider tax breaks, and availability of cheap electricity and land when placing data centers, said study coauthor Landon Marston, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech.
They need to consider water impacts more seriously and put the facilities in regions where they can be better sustained, for the good of the environment and their own bottom line, Marston said.
About an hour’s drive east of The Dalles, Amazon.com Inc is giving back some of the water its massive data centers use. Amazon’s sprawling campuses, spread between Boardman and Umatilla, Oregon, butt up against farmland, a cheese factory and neighborhoods. Like many data centers, they use water primarily in summer, with the servers being air-cooled the rest of the year.
About two-thirds of the water Amazon uses evaporates. The rest is treated and sent to irrigation canals that feed crops and pastures.
Umatilla City Manager Dave Stockdale appreciates that farms and ranches are getting that water, since the main issue the city had as Amazon’s facilities grew was that the city water treatment plant could not have handled the data centers’ discharge.
John DeVoe, executive director of WaterWatch of Oregon, which seeks reform of water laws to protect and restore rivers, criticized it as a “corporate feel-good tactic.”
“Does it actually mitigate for any harm of the server farm’s actual use of water on other interests who may also be using the same source water, like the environment, fish and wildlife?” DeVoe said.
Dawn Rasmussen, who lives on the outskirts of The Dalles, worries that her town is making a mistake in negotiating with Google, likening it to David versus Goliath.
She has seen the level of her well-water drop year after year and worries that sooner or later there will not be enough for everyone.
“At the end of the day, if there’s not enough water, who’s going to win?” she asked.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day