New Fears For Arizona As The Development Of Big Tech Data Centers Are Depleting Water Sources

The American state of Arizona is known for its natural beauty and stunning wildlife. Did we mention how many people come to this state for leisure-filled activities like hiking and more thanks to the beautiful mountain terrain?

The state has a very hot and dry atmosphere and it’s definitely shocking to see the sudden emergency of huge data centers that are owned by the biggest tech giants around the globe.

From Google’s establishment in Mesa to Meta and Microsoft too - you name it and you’ll find some tech giants having their facility developed in the region.

Now at first glance, it might seem like there’s no problem. After all, the more the development, the more the business, and the greater the state can benefit. But wait, this is coming at a huge cost. And that’s linked to the depletion of water sources.

Each data center needs millions of gallons each day to enable the cooling of its facility. Meanwhile, other projects would need even more, and let’s not forget how the state houses thousands of residents that need their own sources.

Ever since such developments started to spring into place, we saw the entire metro area in the Phoenix region be called the destination for all data centers. One after another, they just started to open up, back to back.

So many of these centers are using huge supplies of water to ensure their technical gear stays safe because it can really reach boiling temperatures. Be it mobile sessions, meetings on Zoom, and even videos across YouTube- the things to do are plenty and equipment would obviously be used for this purpose.

For a while now, the search engine giant Google has begun going public with more news on this front. They did admit to using gallons and gallons for their benefits and that’s a lot. It’s almost like supplying 29 entire golf courses with water in America.

In the same way, tech giant Meta has added some of its own details on what exactly it’s doing with the state’s water supplies and how its own facilities make use of several millions of water in cubic meter measurement sources, that are equivalent to 1 billion gallons.

But alarming reports speaking about the state soon having its water supplies depleted are obviously very concerning. Just seven days back, we heard about how the governor put out a plan to prevent construction from taking place in certain regions near Phoenix. The news came when they realized that groundwater couldn’t support the rapid rate at which the construction of these data centers was taking place.

We agree that the data centers are not the only thing to blame but they’re definitely a major factor that contributes to the problem and having scarce water supplies can really be disastrous in the long run as more tech facilities are being planned as we speak this moment.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World