Drought conditions are getting worse in the United States, and that is having a big impact on internet housing real estate.
Data centers generate huge amounts of heat through their servers due to the huge amount of power they use. Water is the cheapest and most common method used to cool hubs.
In just one day, the average data center can use 300,000 gallons of water to cool itself — the equivalent of 100,000 homes, according to researchers at Virginia Tech. West.
Kyle Myers, vice president of environmental health, safety & sustainability at CyrusOne, which owns and operates more than 40 data centers in North America, Europe and South America, said: “Definitely is risky if you depend on water. America. “These data centers are set to run for 20 years, so what will it look like in 2040 here, right?”
CyrusOne was formerly a REIT, but was acquired by investment firms this year KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners. When the company moved to the drought-stricken Phoenix area, it used a different, albeit more expensive, cooling method.
“It’s kind of our ‘aha moment’ where we have to make decisions. We’ve changed our design to move towards zero water consumption, so we don’t run into that kind of risk. that’s it,” Myers said.
Realizing the water danger in New Mexico, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, ran a test program on its Los Lunas data center to reduce relative humidity from 20% to 13%, reducing water consumption. Since then, it has done this in all its hubs.
But Meta’s overall water consumption is still steadily increasing, with a fifth of that water last year coming from areas deemed “water-stressed,” according to Meta’s website. It actively restores water and set a goal last year to restore more water than it consumes by 2030, starting in the west.
Microsoft has also set a goal of becoming an “active country” by 2030.
“The good news is that we’ve invested over the years in continuous innovation in this space so we can essentially recycle almost all of our water,” said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft. used in its data centers”. “In places where it rains, like the Pacific Northwest where we have our headquarters in Seattle, we catch the rain from the roof. In places where it doesn’t rain like Arizona, we develop condensation techniques.”
While companies with their own data centers can do that, so-called co-location data centers for multi-tenancy are increasingly being acquired by private equity firms in search of real estate growth.
There are currently about 1800 co-located data centers in the US and that number is growing as data centers are among the hottest real estate around, offering huge returns for investors. . But the risks from drought are only getting worse. Just over half (50.46%) of the nation is in a state of drought and more than 60% of the lower 48 states, according to the latest reading from US Drought Monitoring. That’s a 9% increase from just a month ago. Much of the west and Midwest in ‘severe’ drought
Smith added: “We need to innovate to get out of the climate crisis. The better we innovate, the cheaper it gets, and the faster we’ll move towards meeting these climate goals.”
