Drought Forces Big Tech to Rethink Data Centers in Latin America - LatinAmerican PostAs South America grapples with prolonged drought, tech gian...
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network
As South America grapples with prolonged drought, tech giants like Google and Amazon are reconsidering their plans for water-dependent data centers. The shift toward more sustainable solutions is reshaping the region’s data infrastructure amid growing environmental concerns.
Data Centers: The Hidden Water Guzzlers
Data centers are the backbone of today’s digital world, housing the servers that process and store the vast amounts of information generated by billions of connected devices. While the energy consumption of these centers has been widely scrutinized, their massive water use has only recently come under the spotlight. Cooling systems, which account for about 40% of a data center’s structure, rely heavily on water to regulate the heat generated by high-frequency processors.
“There are billions of transistors in a circuit in high-frequency processors. That generates a lot of heat,” Eduardo Vera, coordinator of the Center for Mathematical Modeling at the University of Chile, told AFP. To prevent these systems from overheating, vast quantities of water are used, but as drought conditions worsen in parts of South America, this practice is facing increasing scrutiny.
In Chile, where Google plans to build its largest data center in Latin America, concerns over water consumption have reached a critical point. The $200 million project, located in the Santiago suburb of Cerrillos, initially called for a cooling system that would consume an astonishing seven billion liters (1.85 billion gallons) of water annually—roughly equivalent to the yearly consumption of 80,000 residents. But a decade-long drought in the region has fueled public backlash, forcing the tech giant to rethink its plans.
Communities Demand Change
As droughts worsen, local communities in South America are increasingly aware of the environmental toll that massive data centers can take. In Chile, environmentalists quickly raised concerns about Google’s Cerrillos data center project, sparking a legal battle culminating in an environmental court ordering the company to reduce its water consumption.
“They fought us (…), but finally they changed the cooling system, and we set a precedent,” said Tania Rodriguez of the Community Socio-Environmental Movement for Water and Territory in an interview with AFP. Rodriguez’s organization has been at the forefront of the push to protect local water resources, particularly as many communities in Chile rely on dwindling groundwater supplies for survival.
The concerns are not limited to Chile. In Uruguay, environmental activists have similarly challenged Google’s plans for a data center near Montevideo. When the company announced its $850 million investment in 2019, it estimated the center would require 2.7 billion liters of water annually. However, after a record-breaking drought in 2023 nearly depleted the country’s drinking water reserves, public outcry forced Google to reconsider its approach.
“The situation in Uruguay was a wake-up call for us,” a Google spokesperson told AFP. The company pivoted to a more expensive but far less water-intensive air cooling system in response to the crisis.
Air Cooling as the New Standard
With mounting pressure, Google and Amazon have started adopting more sustainable technologies in their Latin American data centers. Air cooling, which relies on ambient air rather than water to cool servers, has become a key solution to the region’s water scarcity challenges.
Last month, Google announced it had revised its plans for the Cerrillos facility, opting for air-cooling technology that drastically reduces water consumption. “We’ve made significant changes to our original plans,” a Google spokesperson told AFP, adding that the new system would use air cooling to minimize water use. “This approach is part of our broader commitment to becoming more climate-conscious and using natural resources responsibly.”
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has also committed to more sustainable practices in its future data centers. Will Hewes, head of water sustainability for AWS, told AFP that the company aims to make all of its data centers “water-positive” by 2030. AWS intends to conserve or replenish more water than it uses, a critical goal given the growing demand for data processing and storage worldwide.
“These changes are expensive but necessary,” Hewes explained. “With climate change impacting every corner of the globe, especially in regions like Latin America, we need to ensure that our facilities are not putting additional strain on already scarce resources.”
In Uruguay, Google’s pivot to air cooling is expected to significantly reduce its impact on the local water supply, a change that environmentalists like Rodriguez see as a victory. But while the switch to air cooling represents a step forward, it’s clear that water remains a crucial issue for the region’s data infrastructure.
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