“In the extreme case, at the end of the century, it was almost all winter,” said Sean McKenna, executive director of hydrological sciences at the Desert Research Institute, a research division of the Higher Education Nevada system.
This loss will undermine an essential function of the snowy mantle of Sierra: to reliably deliver water to farmers and cities when it is most necessary in spring and summer, both in Nevada and California.
These change of exchange change will oblige the region to develop better ways of storing, preserving and recycling the water it obtains, says McKenna. The towns, villages and agencies in northern Nevada will also have to assess and carefully plan the collective impacts of continuous growth and development on the interconnected water system, in particular with regard to eager water projects such as data centers, he adds.
“We cannot consider each of them as one-off, without considering that there can be dozens or dozens over the next 15 years,” explains McKenna.
Thirsty data centers
The data centers aspire the water in two main ways.
As the giant rooms of servers racks treats information and consume energy, they generate heat which must be distant to avoid dysfunctions and damage to equipment. The processing units optimized for the training and execution of AI models often draw more electricity and, in turn, produce more heat.
To keep things cool, more and more data centers have turned to liquid cooling systems that do not need as much electricity as the fan cooling or air conditioning.
These often rest on water to absorb heat and transfer it to exterior cooling towers, where a large part of the humidity evaporates. Microsoft American data centers, for example, could have evaporated directly nearly 185,000 “fresh water” gallons as part of the formation of the large GPT-3 language of Openai, according to the A preliminary study in 2023 Led by researchers from the University of California in Riverside. (Research has since been evaluated by peers and awaits publication.)
What is less appreciated, however, is that the largest drain in the water center generally occurs indirectly, to power plants generating additional electricity for the turbocharged AI sector. These installations, in turn, require more water to cool the equipment, among other purposes.