Texas Researchers Say Permian Wastewater Could Cool AI Data Centers
Offers Another 17 Million SPR Barrels as Fuel Crisis Deepens Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and… The artificial intelligence boom is placing a dangerous strain on the world’s water and energy resources.
As hyperscalers build up resource-hungry data centers at a breakneck pace, demand projections for these finite resources are skyrocketing faster than policymakers can keep pace.
But a new study from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin suggests that there may be a way to sustainably source water for data centers by using wastewater from the oil and gas industry.
The water and energy use of AI data centers is enormous and growing rapidly.
Large data centers can directly consume as much as 5 million gallons of water per day, according to figures from theEnvironmental and Energy Study Institute.
But hard numbers are hard to come by, as the tech sector operates under extreme opacity.
And, what is more, new studies suggest that those figures may be greatly underestimating the real water usage of these operations.
Recent research from the University of Michigan contends that these water footprints should also account for the water usage of the energy being produced to power those data centers.
A newpapercalculates that when water used offsite is included in the water accounting of three large AI data centers planned for Michigan, the projects’ water footprint increases by a whopping 14 billion gallons.
“There has been much less attention to this indirect water usage, even though that oftentimes is significantly higher than the direct water usage and has impacts on watersheds and regional water resources,” Shaolei Ren, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, recentlytoldBloomberg.
Finding a way to limit the water usage of these projects, or make that usage more sustainable, is paramount.
This is where new research from the University of Texas at Austin comes in.
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