blackjacktable| After the lack of electricity, is there a lack of water? JPMorgan Chase: By 2030, data centers will consume 450 million gallons of water every day!

SourceBlackjacktableWall Street news

Although the demand for power infrastructure and supply chain in AI data centers has triggered an investment boom, JPMorgan Chase reported that the huge amount of water consumption in data centers has been relatively ignored, and daily water consumption may reach 4% by 2030.Blackjacktable.50 million gallons. In areas where water resources are scarce, the huge demand for water in data centers may lead to increased competition, which may affect the availability of water resources and even lead to the closure of data centers.

The AI frenzy continues, with investors investing in the theme of "Powering up America", including grid companies, commodities such as copper, gold, silver and uranium, and artificial intelligence chipmakers as many Wall Street majors expect the number of generative artificial intelligence data centres in the US to explode by the end of the century. However, the problem of water consumption is relatively ignored.BlackjacktableYes.

JPMorgan Chase's Asia-Pacific Equity Research Division recently released a report entitled "in-depth discussion of the impact of electricity, cooling, Power Grid and ESG" (Deep Dive into Power, Cooling, Electric Grid and ESG implications), detailing the impact of infrastructure on the development of artificial intelligence. This paper specially introduces the power consumption of artificial intelligence data center. At the same time, Goldman Sachs has previously found that Virginia's commercial electricity demand is soaring at a time when "next-generation AI deals" are soaring.

In addition, even Blackstone chief executive Steve Schwarzman and BlackRock chairman and chief executive Larry Fink (Larry Fink) have joined the grid and AI investment themes, because there is a lot of upside in the coming years-unless AI demand collapses.

It is worth noting that at the end of the report, JPMorgan Chase stressed: "although the data center is easy to focus on because of the large amount of power consumption, relatively speaking, the high water consumption of the data center has been largely ignored." this is also a basic characteristic of data center operations. "

Total water consumption in global data centres, including on-site cooling and off-site power generation, grew by 6 per cent a year from 2017 to 2022, according to JPMorgan Chase, citing data from Bluefield Research. The research newspaper says that by 2030, water consumption may jump to 4. 5 percent a day.Blackjacktable.50 million gallons. This is equivalent to the need for about 681 Olympic-standard swimming pools of fresh water a day to cool global data centers.

According to the research report, the way of water use in data centers is similar to carbon emissions, and water use in data centers can also be divided into range 1, range 2 and range 3. In this case, range 1 refers to water used for on-site server cooling, and range 2 refers to off-site water used for power generation. Range 3 is considered to be water for the server manufacturing supply chain.

Specifically, the use of water in scope 2 is the indirect use of water in the data center related to power generation. Traditional thermal power plants (such as coal-fired power plants, natural gas power plants, etc.) heat water to produce steam, which is used for rotating turbines to generate electricity. Water is also used to dissipate heat in the cooling tower. It is worth noting that when using thermoelectricity, the data center's range 2 water footprint may be much larger than range 1.

The research newspaper pointed out that:

"taking into account the amount of water required for scope 1 and range 2 operations, data centre-related water intake could reach 4.2 billion to 6.6 billion cubic metres, more than half of the total annual water intake in the UK, by 2027 to meet global AI demand."

The study further pointed out that in areas where water resources are scarce, the huge demand for water in data centers may lead to increased competition, which may affect the availability of water resources and even lead to the closure of data centers. "to eliminate the heat generated by the server, millions of gallons of water evaporate in the cooling system every day, which is most of the water used in the data center."

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