Toxic Clouds and Dirty Data - The environmental impact of data centers

I just came across this awesome video from our friends at Penn looking at the environmental costs of data centres. It is short and accessible in tone which is a plus!

Coming off our discussion of extraction with Crawford and Paglen last week and leading into our discussion on infrastructures next week, data centres are such an important site for thinking through the material impacts of seemingly immaterial algorithms and services. 

We have discussed the energy and carbon costs of technologies such as large AI models, but what this video also draws attention to is the water required to cool data centers. Medium sized data centres use 400k gallons of fresh water a day to cool servers. They state that half of data centers use drinking water as a cooling mechanism. There are 179 data centers located in California alone. I am not sure of the exact impact that data centers have on Californian drinking water, but this is a conversation that is distinctly lacking from current discussions on the current "megadrought". 

Here is the full link: https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/news-insights/toxic-clouds-and-dirty-data/