As Australia rides the AI boom with dozens of new investments in datacentres in Sydney and Melbourne, experts are warning about the impact these massive projects will have on already strained water resources.
Water demand to service datacentres in Sydney alone is forecast to be larger than the volume of Canberra’s total drinking water within the next decade.
In Melbourne the Victorian government has announced a “$5.5m investment to become Australia’s datacentre capital”, but the hyperscale datacentre applications on hand already exceed the water demands of nearly all of the state’s top 30 business customers combined.
Technology companies, including Open AI and Atlassian, are pushing for Australia to become a hub for data processing and storage. But with 260 datacentres operating and dozens more in the offing, experts are flagging concerns about the impact on the supply of drinking water.
Sydney Water has estimated up to 250 megalitres a day would be needed to service the industry by 2035 (a larger volume than Canberra’s total drinking water).
Cooling requires ‘huge amount of water’
Prof Priya Rajagopalan, director of the Post Carbon Research Centre at RMIT, says water and electricity demands of datacentres depend on the cooling technology used.
“If you’re just using evaporative cooling, there is a lot of water loss from the evaporation, but if you are using sealers, there is no water loss but it requires a huge amount of water to cool,” she says.
While older datacentres tend to rely on air cooling, demand for more computing power means higher server rack density so the output is warmer, meaning centres have turned to water for cooling .
The amount of water used in a datacentre can vary greatly. Some centres, such as NextDC, are moving towards liquid-to-chip cooling, which cools the processor or GPU directly instead of using air or water to cool the whole room.
NextDC says it has completed an initial smaller deployment of the cooling technology but it has the capacity to scale up for ultra-high-density environments to allow for greater processing power without an associated rise in power consumption because liquid cooling is more efficient. The company says its modelling suggests power usage effectiveness (PUE, a measure of energy efficiency) could go as low as 1.15.
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The datacentre industry accounts for its sustainability with two metrics: water usage effectiveness (WUE) and power usage effectiveness (PUE). These measure the amount of water or power used relative to computing work.
WUE is measured by annual water use divided by annual IT energy use (kWh). For example, a 100MW datacentre using 3ML a day would have a WUE of 1.25. The closer the number is to 1, the more efficient it is. Several countries mandate minimum standards. Malaysia has recommended a WUE of 1.8, for example.
But even efficient facilities can still use large…
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