Amazon and Microsoft are considering building data centers in Aragon (northeastern Spain), a prospect that some in Europe are concerned about because of water use.
This is an extension of an ongoing conversation in the EU:
Much has been written about A.I.’s energy demand and carbon footprint. But running a data center is also extremely thirsty work. In 2024, Europe’s data center industry consumed about 62 million cubic meters of water, which is equivalent to about 24,000 Olympic swimming pools.
After reading this, I thought, geez, that’s a lot of water. But when converting this to acre-feet, it’s roughly 50,000 acre-feet. A large number, for sure, but not astronomically large. By comparison, Granger Lake in Texas stores roughly the same amount of water.
In 2022, total water usage in Texas eclipsed 15 million acre-feet, of which approximately 7.5 million acre-feet were consumed by irrigation. This makes the 50,000 figure from Europe seem negligible for an population of 450 million.
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