From Datacentres Boom to Actual Booms That Target Datacentres, Now Struggling to Justify Humongous Energy and Water Consumption
Turbulent times for a filthy industry
Energy is getting expensive and water is becoming ever more scarce in large parts of the US. We habitually add links about both problems. They're in Daily Links.
Transportation costs as well as construction costs simply mean that the rising cost of energy will result in all prices going up, including the price of housing and food. Energy is at the core of many things. As for water, without any water there will be virtually no agriculture, hence no food.
Humans depend on water and food for basic survival. Without them, lethal social unrest commences.
Datacentres that are used for mindless "entertainment" (as Microsoft calls it) like slop are not a priority at this time, so people start asking GAFAM the "hard questions" [1,2] and some news from yesterday [3,4] helps confirm what we saw last week about approximately half of all datacentre projects set to be canceled or put on the ice. Some people even resort to violence over it [5].
This is just one of the parallel of simultaneous crises we spoke of yesterday in relation to GAFAM, the emergent one being bombs which target their facilities. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Investors press Amazon, Microsoft and Google on water, power use in US data centers
Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet's Google have each recently abandoned construction of multibillion-dollar data centers over community opposition and now the companies are coming under shareholder pressure over the environmental impact of their projects.
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Amazon, Microsoft, and Google under investor pressure to disclose site-specific data center water and power consumption — more than a dozen shareholders ask for transparency ahead of annual investor meetings
More than a dozen investors are pressuring Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet's Google to provide detailed data on water and energy consumption at their U.S. data centers, Reuters reported today. The pressure comes as all three companies have recently scrapped multibillion-dollar data center projects following community opposition, and as North American data centers consumed nearly 1 trillion liters of water in 2025, according to market research firm Mordor Intelligence.
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Data centers: A lack of green electricity puts expansion at risk
According to experts, the German government’s strategy to double the capacity of the “factories of the 21st century” will lead to additional CO₂ emissions. But that is not the only problem.
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British company pulls the plug on Lansing data center proposal
The British company Deep Green has withdrawn its proposal to build a $120 million data center in downtown Lansing on the site of two seldom-used municipal parking lots.
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Home of Indianapolis city councilor shot at over his support of datacenters
Gibson had recently expressed support for rezoning tied to a proposed 14-acre, $500m datacenter project in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood of the municipal district that he represents.
Image source: A London Fog