2023-05-25 16:30:00
RESOURCES – The development by Meta of a large data center in the region of Toledo (Castilla-la-Mancha), is causing concern because of its estimated consumption of more than 600 million liters of drinking water in a region where the water is scarce.
Meta, the conglomerate run by Mark Zuckerberg and on which Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram depend, will install its largest data processing center in Europe in the province of Toledo.
It will be, more precisely, in Talavera de la Reina, the ancient capital of ceramics which today, despite its proximity to Madrid, is going through a period of social, economic and demographic crisis.
Economic opportunity…
The regional government of Castile-La Mancha decided a few weeks ago to continue the Meta Data Center Campus project, highlighting its impact on the territory – more than 1,000 jobs and 250 highly qualified direct jobs – but ignoring the fact that the infrastructure will consume more than 600 million liters of drinking water per year.
As explained The country“total” consumption, including “non-potable” water, could reach “120 liters per second in the data center and 33 liters per second” in the rest of the facilities. At this rate, we are talking about 4.8 billion liters of water per year. However, the company has not officially confirmed these estimates.
Meta currently has three such facilities in Sweden, Denmark and Ireland. A few months ago, a survey by the Noordhollands Dagblab media showed that Microsoft’s data center in the Netherlands would consume 84 million liters of water in 2021, while the company had announced a consumption of 12 to 20 million. liters.
…but deleterious environmental impact?
This “under-declaration” is not a first. A similar pattern occurred in the Netherlands. The Middenmeer data and information storage centers of the Microsoft firm consumed up to seven times more water than what was planned at the start of the project.
Technically, water is used in abundance within data centers in order to reduce the temperature of servers or other electronic installations present (computers, storage bays, etc.).
Several methods exist to achieve efficient cooling. One of them is “free cooling”, which uses outside air. When the climate imposes particularly high temperatures, even heat waves, this is obviously impossible. This is the case in Spain and makes the use of water essential.
In addition to the location of the establishment of the Meta data center which questions, the affection of water in gigantic quantities for such purposes denotes vis-à-vis government communications or from private companies regarding the preservation of environmental resources.
And even more so at a time when the needs, especially in drinking water, are soaring on a planetary scale. Several reports from the United Nations (UN), the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) put forward worrying figures.
In 2019, 2.2 billion people “do not have access to safely managed drinking water services”. In 2020, “more than half of the world’s population, or 4.2 billion people, lack safely managed sanitation services.” Water stress now concerns 2 billion people, a figure that is likely to increase.
#Zuckerbergs #mega #data #center #Spain #require #million #liters #water #year