{"id":68078,"date":"2024-05-16T14:57:53","date_gmt":"2024-05-16T19:57:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=68078"},"modified":"2024-05-16T14:57:53","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T19:57:53","slug":"the-surging-demand-for-data-is-guzzling-virginias-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=68078","title":{"rendered":"The surging demand for data is guzzling Virginia\u2019s water"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The surging demand for data is guzzling Virginia\u2019s water<\/a><\/h3>\n

The commonwealth is home to the data center capital of the world. Can it handle AI’s thirst?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n

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Every email you send has a home. Every uploaded file, web search, and social media post does, too. In massive buildings erected from miles of concrete, stacked servers hum with the electricity required to process and store every byte of information that modern lives rely on.<\/p>\n

In recent years, these data centers have been rapidly expanding in the United States. But the gargantuan facilities do more than keep cloud servers running \u2014 they also guzzle absurd amounts of water to run cooling systems that protect their components from overheating. Now, as artificial intelligence applications become ubiquitous, they\u2019re using more water than ever.<\/p>\n

Northern Virginia is the data center capital of the globe, where more than 300 facilities process nearly\u00a070 percent<\/a>\u00a0of the world\u2019s digital information, a job that requires ever more electricity. A utility that serves the area, Dominion Energy,\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0during a May 2 earnings call that the industry\u2019s demand for electricity had more than doubled in recent years. The week before that call, Google announced\u00a0a billion-dollar<\/a>\u00a0expansion of three Virginia facilities, following a $35 billion investment by Amazon Web Services in the same area last year. State lawmakers and environmental groups have begun worrying about what this industry boom means for the area\u2019s supply of water.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of these data centers will use resources equivalent to a small city for energy and water,\u201d said Ann Bennett, chair of data center issues in the Sierra Club\u2019s Virginia chapter. \u201cThey are being built on a scale that we just haven\u2019t seen in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

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The surging demand for data is guzzling Virginia\u2019s water The commonwealth is home to the data center capital of the world. Can it handle AI’s thirst? Google Every email you send has a home. Every uploaded file, web search, and social media post does, too. In massive buildings erected from miles of concrete, stacked servers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[34556,1103,15759,34555,866],"class_list":["post-68078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-date-centers","tag-electricity","tag-grist","tag-sachi-kitajima-mulkey","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68078"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68079,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68078\/revisions\/68079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}