A large Microsoft data center in Goodyear, Arizona is using a significant amount of the desert town’s water supply to run its cloud computing and Artificial Intellegence (AI) operations.
AI demands an incredible amount of energy to operate, leading to a large environmental impact. Additionally, AI also consumes a substantial amount of water, especially in data centers where engineers use water to cool servers and prevent overheating.
Microsoft’s Goodyear center’s water usage has been kept confidential by the company, with exact figures redacted from city records. However, estimates suggest that once the third building is completed, the campus could consume 56 million gallons of drinking water annually.
To put that in perspective? That’s approximately the amount that a total of 670 Goodyear families would consume in a year combined. And though that’s a lot of water anywhere, the water scarcity in southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert is exacerbated by a drying Colorado River and loopholes in property development regulations. This has created a severe water crisis in the region.
In 2019, Goodyear announced the establishment of its facility, which happened shortly after Microsoft invested $1 billion in the relatively unknown OpenAI. It is unlikely that Microsoft’s facility will cause any water shortages for households in the Phoenix area in the near future but choosing to divert water away from families, in order to have AI like ChatGPT generate content seems very stupid idea.
This is one of Microsoft’s numerous data centers around the world, which require significant resources to operate, particularly for AI projects. Despite the increasing heat in the Sonoran Desert, this facility is still operational, highlighting the industry’s focus on AI development. In response to these allegation, both companies have declined to comment.
Reference- The Atlantic reports, Futurism, Microsoft website