Microsoft 's massive new AI data center is using up a small Arizona desert town's water supply and redacting its exact consumption from city documents. The acre campus in Goodyear will use an estimated 56 million gallons of water a year when it's completed - as much as families need for a year, according to a report in The Atlantic.
The plant opened in with two buildings, and plans for a third, designed for use by Microsoft and the heavily Microsoft-funded OpenAI. Powering AI requires vast amounts of electricity, which in turn generates heat and requires water to cool servers down. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told The Atlantic: 'We're going to have to make tough choices in the near future to make sure our state is protected for future generations.
The data center sits on a acre site in the outskirts of the desert town Goodyear, Arizona. The state has been tackling extreme weather, droughts and high temperatures over the last few years. Last summer was Phoenix's hottest on record, with 55 days of temperatures over degrees, stretching the grid to the max. It was compounded by the worse drought the region has faced in 1, years, with the Colorado River, which provides drinking water and hydropower, dwindling.
High-demand factories and plants strain the water supply even further. Attorney General Kris Mayes told the Atlantic: 'Allowing one more data center to come to our state is an easy but stupid decision in a lot of cases. Microsoft has refused to provide the exact figures on their Goodyear center's water use, according to The Atlantic. They reportedly redacted exact figures in city records, saying it is 'proprietary' information. But they did provide an estimate, saying it will use 56 million gallons of water a year once the third building is completed.
It is not just a problem in Arizona, researchers at UC Riverside estimated last year that global AI demand could cause data centers to use up to 1. Microsoft say they are continually striving to improve the sustainability of their data centers and to be 'good neighbors'. But one former Microsoft employee told The Atlantic that they were 'being lazy' and said there was much more they could do. AI and cloud computing data centers do not only pose a problem to water, they also demand huge volumes of electricity.
