US data centres embrace innovation as water pressures mount

摘要

The steady advance of water efficiencies at data centres in the US reached new heights this month when Nautilus Data Technologies announced plans to develop a $300 million data centre in Maine that will consume no water. The Nautilus technology functions by siting a data centre on, or beside, a naturally cold body of water. Using corrosion-resistant pipes and a heat exchanger, cold water passes through the data centre and absorbs heat - purportedly requiring minimal filtration and no treatment chemicals - before being discharged back to the original water source. Nautilus has already demonstrated the technology at a floating data centre it commissioned earlier this year in Port of Stockton, CA. The Nautilus water-cooled approach is a departure from traditional data centre cooling processes, which have typically used evaporation from cooling towers to cool air that is then circulated through server rooms (see graphic below). These systems require relatively low energy use, but come at the cost of high water consumption. A report conducted for the US Department of Energy in 2016 pegged data centre water usage in the US at over 165 billion gallons annually - a volume that is likely to have increased significantly since. Google's water withdrawals, for example, more than doubled from 2.5 billion gallons in 2016 to 5.2 billion gallons in 2019.