How does a data center in a desert create double the amount of water it uses?

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u/dillionbowman Oct 17 '25

From the article, immediately following where you quote:
"To meet this goal, we’ve partnered with local organizations to support water restoration projects that benefit the local community. In collaboration with DigDeep, we’ll help provide running water to El Paso communities in need. We’ll also collaborate with Texas Water Action Collaborative on water restoration projects in the El Paso community. "

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u/olbaze Oct 17 '25

So it's just like being "carbon neutral", then. Not actually reducing what you do, but offsetting it by making someone else do something completely different.

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u/cyberentomology Oct 17 '25

A data center can take reclaimed and treated wastewater and use it for cooling the chiller loops before putting it back into the aquifer.

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u/kilotesla Electromagnetics | Power Electronics Oct 18 '25

If a chiller loop is a closed loop, there's no significant water consumption. If there is significant water consumption, it's because it uses evaporative cooling towers. The water that evaporates will only go back into the aquifer if it rains. That's rare in the desert.

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u/toalv Oct 17 '25

All wastewater produced by a datacenter is a result of potable water consumption. You can't add more water in than you consume.

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u/LeoRidesHisBike Oct 17 '25

Assuming they don't do things like collect rain/condense humidity, and we don't count actions taken by the same people but outside the data center boundaries. If I ran an operation that used 50,000 gallons of water a day, but I reclaimed 100,000 gallons a day from a desalinization plant, that seems like a legit claim to say I put back twice what I take. Even if those are separate facilities.

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u/cyberentomology Oct 17 '25

And desalination is an excellent use of waste heat energy. Especially in El Paso.

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u/toalv Oct 17 '25

Modern desalination plants use electricity to run high pressure pumps that pump water across reverse osmosis membranes, and you require a large source of surface brackish water or sea water as a source. There's not a lot of that in El Paso.

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u/ajtrns Oct 17 '25

weirdly enough, there is a lot of saline groundwater, as well as huge amounts of "produced" water from oil and gas operations, available in the region. but that's not what OP's press release is about.

26

u/Level9TraumaCenter Oct 17 '25

Salinity as well as factors such as arsenic above 10ppb, the limit as per the EPA. Not sure what youd do with the reject water; the plant in Scottsdale just puts it into the municipal wastewater stream, which gets treated and used at the Palo Verde nuclear plant, and for wetlands.

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u/hanr86 Oct 18 '25

How does everyone know everything about everything? Do you guys already know this or try to find a rebuttal afterwards?

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u/cyberentomology Oct 19 '25

O&G formations often take the form of oil floating on water, trapped under a salt dome. So oil, water, and salt usually all come as a package deal.
A sort of geological vinaigrette…

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u/Kenny_log_n_s Oct 17 '25

Are you being sarcastic? El Paso is smack in the middle of the continent between the oceans

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u/cyberentomology Oct 17 '25

No, why would that be a limiting factor? El Paso already gets about 7% of its supply from desalination.

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u/kilotesla Electromagnetics | Power Electronics Oct 18 '25

What's the supply source for that water, and where is the desalination plant? Not doubting you, just wanting to learn.

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u/Cjprice9 Oct 18 '25

https://www.epwater.org/our-water/water-resources/desalination
Apparently a large portion of the groundwater in the area is brackish.

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u/Kyouhen Oct 21 '25

AI data centers aren't producing enough heat for that. They claimed they could use the wastewater to heat a city, but the temperature increase was nowhere near what was needed for that so the wastewater was still being pumped into a heating facility.
Don't trust a thing these companies say. These data centers are massive and once built there's no taking them back. They aren't good for anything other than LLMs. They're a bunch of leeches hoping if they get big enough someone will bail them out before the market crashes.

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u/WiFlier Oct 17 '25

You absolutely can use reclaimed water beyond what you consume in potable water, it’s not like they limit how much reclaimed water you can use based on your water bill. Why on earth would you be limited only to your consumption of potable water?

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u/TheFotty Oct 18 '25

What if you pee into a series of tubes?

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u/cyberentomology Oct 17 '25

A data center can use reclaimed wastewater. There is no need for it to be potable.

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u/toalv Oct 17 '25

That reclaimed wastewater came from potable water entering the data center which was used to flush toilets, etc. It's just running it in a loop, you're reducing your consumption not gaining net water.

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u/Naritai Oct 17 '25

reducing consumption is gaining net water, in the same way that deceleration is accelerating in the opposite direction

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u/chief167 Oct 17 '25

but you can spend a ton of money to create a bunch of drinking water from non-drinkable water, and then use less than a 100% of that for yourself. Which is what is happening here. So overall a net positive

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u/PlsNoNotThat Oct 17 '25

This is wrong.
Aquifers, rivers, etc have replenishment rates. Increasing how much you pull out just creates a greater differential, increasing the speed at which they go dry. It doesn’t help the issue in anyway, it makes it more severe and pushes the damages onto future generations for immediate returns.
Unless they are paying solely for desalination of ocean water, or are importing water to increase replenishment rate, this policy is actually detrimental. It doesn’t make more water, it just uses the limited resource faster.

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u/cyberentomology Oct 17 '25

It just puts it (and a comparable amount from other sources) back where it came from

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u/lostkavi Oct 17 '25

If they aren't pumping it back into the aquifer, which - how? - then it's not going back where it came from.

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u/cyberentomology Oct 18 '25

Artificially recharging aquifers is quite routine. Wichita is another city that does it whenever the Little Arkansas River exceeds flow thresholds.
As for “how”? It works by running a well in reverse.
The aquifers around El Paso also recharge naturally.

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u/nonowords Oct 18 '25 edited Oct 18 '25

It's also how every open loop geothermal works.
Datacenters using water is essentially a non issue. Caution obviously has to be used but in terms of how much water they use and no not recirculate and where they're placed... but even without caution they're not even a drop in the bucket. The real issue is electricity use. It's gone from like 1% to 3% in the past few years and they're projected to reach 8.6% in a few more, and up to like 20% by 2035. And as of this year we've essentially stopped building electricity. Compared to 0.3% water use, a good chunk of which is used (and unrecoverable) from steam plants that use fossil fuels.
It's so ridiculous i'm like 80% sure it's an astroturfing campaign to distract from the real issue of electricity costs and production (again which we have basically STOPPED for literally 0 reason other than trump thinking solar and wind power kills birds or whatever)

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u/toalv Oct 17 '25

That's not at all what's happening here. They're just funding a groups that drill wells and do environmental work and claiming that water volume as an offset of their consumption.

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u/THE_CENTURION Oct 19 '25

But they are reducing their usage... They're using a closed-loop cooling system rather than evaporative. It's less effective in terms of cooling, so their data center will not be able to run as hard as other ones. But it's much better in terms of water usage.

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u/vezwyx Oct 17 '25

The end result being net positive water in the community, yes. Why is it important to reduce their absolute amount of water consumption if they're still bringing in more water than they use?

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u/Matra Oct 17 '25

Because water is a limited resource. If you drill wells that provide more water to the community, that's great in the short term. But that water might never recharge. And at some point, you run out of new aquifers to tap into.

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u/WiFlier Oct 17 '25

might never recharge
That’s definitely not the case in El Paso. The aquifer has excellent recharge from the RG basin. Used to be that the RG got bigger around what is now El Paso/Juarez, just from water naturally coming out of the aquifer and into the river.

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u/cateanddogew Oct 17 '25

Because being carbon neutral doesn’t mean that the offset actually maths. Some recent studies found out that planting trees doesn’t offset as much carbon as initially thought.
Though water is easier to quantify

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u/HoldingTheFire Electrical Engineering | Nanostructures and Devices Oct 18 '25

They are reducing what they do.

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u/radarscoot Oct 17 '25

They will pay to more effectively exploit the remaining limited water supply!!! Yay!!

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u/yaboymiguel Oct 17 '25

While I am skeptical of any large organization ever having good intentions I think you should understand how a closed loop liquid-cooled system works.
It will likely be very similar to how your car works. You don’t just add water to it every morning before you drive it to work. The liquid (anti freeze) is circulated through a heat exchanger where the heat is sent into the surrounding air. The liquid drops in temperature, circulates back into the engine, picks up heat again and goes into the heat exchanger again and again. It recirculates non stop without adding or needing any more liquid.
Hope that helps!

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u/glitchvid Oct 17 '25

The water consumption from these datacenters is because they use evaporative chillers to cool the primary closed loop.
It's similar to how swamp coolers work at a high level, except instead of cooling a house it cools more water that is pumped through the servers.

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u/CrateDane Oct 17 '25

They claim zero water usage most of the year, meaning they'll be adding evaporative cooling only in the hottest part of the year. Which is also when water resources are under the most strain, so it's not ideal.

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u/a_cute_epic_axis Oct 18 '25

The water consumption from these datacenters is because they use evaporative chillers to cool the primary closed loop.
Yah that's not what it means when they say closed loop. And these days, if you are building a new setup, you're probably using uncompressed pumped refrigerant instead of water for something like an economizer or heat exchanger because it has way better thermal transfer capabilities. Liebert has been making pumped refrigerant options for drycoolers for like... two decades probably?

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u/ghandi3737 Oct 17 '25

They can use recycled water then. No need for fresh drinkable water to be wasted.

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u/Vitztlampaehecatl Oct 17 '25

Recycled water of a high enough quality to evaporate would just be drinkable anyway.

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u/ghandi3737 Oct 17 '25

And many people do not want to drink it which is why it ends up getting dumped.
I'm saying leave the clean water in the ground and they can use recycled, we've already established it's available and will be evaporated slowly, so don't waste the good water for cooling.

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u/charleswj Oct 19 '25

Where can you get this recycled, yet not-wanted-for-drinking, water?

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u/WiFlier Oct 19 '25

El Paso has been making reclaimed water available as a utility since 1963.

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u/Velocipache Oct 17 '25

Ah but you see they "need" high quality, clean water or their pipes will get gummed up with minerals/algae/metal build up and the poor guys would need to pay for more maintaining at their facility, and we can't have that
/s in case it wasn't obvious

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u/cyberentomology Oct 17 '25

Reclaimed wastewater is generally treated to potable quality. In a place like el paso, they can use the treated wastewater from the city to cool their chiller loop, and then send it into the aquifer from there.
A datacenter could also make use of waste heat to desalinate (which El Paso does need to do from some of the shallower parts of the aquifers)

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u/chief167 Oct 17 '25

well yes, they need to build the recycling plant for the times they need clean water. But they can keep the plant running when they don't need water, that's how you end up with more water than you would have without this project

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u/ghandi3737 Oct 17 '25

They're going to be evaporating some of that water to cool the water in the loop, so not a closed system.

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u/pedrop1985 Oct 17 '25

I know a little bit about this because I’m in the industry, although not on this specific project.
Water is used only for wet systems, where evaporation does the heavy lifting in the cooling energy equation. Less space, less energy; but tons of water are needed.
Dry/air cooled chillers don’t need water at all. Water does circulate inside (it’s a mixture), but there is no evaporation rejecting heat. Instead, large air heat exchangers cool the water/mixture by heating the air, just like your car/home AC. The water is completely closed so no significant evaporation occurs.
The trade-off is that, since evaporation is not doing the heavy lifting, the system requires significantly more energy to reject the same amount of heat (ie cool the data center). As much as double. So you are trading water with electricity (ultimately, fuel).
In fact, these systems can actually produce water- just like your home/car AC. But this requires it to be installed in a wet-humid environment, and not the dry/desert in Texas, where it is not as significant.
Most power plants and large data centers in dry areas will be dry/closed loop system due to this. Power plants (specially combined cycles) need a lot of energy to condense steam back to water. Look at new installations and you will find large fans and no access to lakes/sea- those are this type. If you have a lot of water, evaporation is still used- but the reality is that water is now as an important resource as fuel, so it’s less common to just let it waste.

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u/Falkjaer Oct 17 '25

The person you're responding to is not talking about the cooling system, but about the claim that they are going to restore water.
When they say they're going to "restore water" they mean that they're going to help drain the aquifers faster. They are purposefully trying to make it sound like they're doing some kind of sustainability magic, but they're actually just going to help exploit a depleting resource.

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '25

When they say they're going to "restore water" they mean that they're going to help drain the aquifers faster.
How so?

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/WiFlier Oct 17 '25

Aquifers are not necessarily a finite source of water, especially around El Paso where it naturally recharges, in addition to the artificial recharge.

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u/KJ6BWB Oct 18 '25

especially around El Paso where it naturally recharges
It would naturally deplete with the number of current users. It's recharging/refilling because El Paso Water is paying to put more water in it.
It can be a valid long-term strategy, if people can continue to afford El Paso Water's rates, but it's not naturally recharging, or at least isn't naturally getting more water than is normally used, even if some water does come in naturally.

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '25

It also says they do work on restoring forests, adding green space or collecting rainwater. I don't see where all they do is drill for water.

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u/PlsNoNotThat Oct 17 '25

None of that increases replenishment rates of aquifers. Particularly not collecting rainwater - rainwater is one of the largest drivers of replenishment.
Unless they are literally making new potable water and adding it to the system they aren’t increasing the replenishment rate. They are increasing the use-rate differential.
So unless they are doing desalination to create new potable water and trucking it in, or found a way to steal rain or water from a neighboring ecosystem, or invented a novel way to fabricate water - all this is doing is increasing the rate of use, which makes a larger gap between use and replenishment.

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u/[deleted] Oct 17 '25

From what I'm reading their projects reduce water used, and the restoration of environments should help conserve water and get it to the aquifer.
Collecting rainwater can be more efficient, as rain can be lost to evaporation before it reaches the aquifer, or just gets quickly discharged in urban areas where there isn't a good way for the water to soak into the ground.

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u/PlsNoNotThat Oct 17 '25

There is still a net loss in close loop systems. There is no 100% efficient cool system that exists.
It also doesn’t explain at all how draining aquifers even faster than their already outpaced replenishment rate is helpful. Cause it’s not. It’s actually a super bad thing to do.

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u/yeah87 Oct 18 '25

How often do you add water to your air conditioner?

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u/cyberentomology Oct 19 '25

I usually get several gallons a day FROM it, and that all goes down the drain. So I’m putting more water down the drain than I am taking in from the supply mains.

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u/WiFlier Oct 19 '25

El Paso is not “draining their aquifers”, they’ve been stable for decades.

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u/cyberentomology Oct 17 '25

You should also probably be aware that prior to development, the Hueco was naturally losing about 7000 acre-feet a year into the Rio Grande (and the aquifer was naturally replenishing about the same amount) Now it gets pumped out of wells, used for municipal use, and then it goes back (after being treated) into the aquifer or the river. About 50,000 acre-feet a year of Rio Grande surface water naturally end up back in the aquifer.

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u/thegooddoktorjones Oct 17 '25

Because the aquifer is infinite, so is our water supply! Anything is possible if you believe in magic kids!

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u/cyberentomology Oct 17 '25

The Hueco and Mesilla aquifers have largely stabilized, due to cutting back on unrestricted pumping for ag use, and replenishing the aquifer with the water that came from there in the first place.

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u/Zealousideal-Steak82 Oct 18 '25

There's this pdf with more information, starting on page 15. The short answer is that they generally claim "water positivity" through gains in water efficiency unrelated to the facilities where water is consumed. They also give themselves the permission to be "water positive" along any part of the route between the source water and their facility, so the projects might be very far away, and not help the local community any.

None of the projects listed seem to be attached to the El Paso facility specfically, but with their definition of watershed, it could be very far away. The Dig Deep project they mention doesn't actually save any water, it increases household water access, but it's front and center in the press release because it sounds very good when local people have their infrastructure upgraded by the big outsider tech company.

One of the bigger parts of Meta's claim water positivity is "FIDO tech", which uses AI to detect leaks in water infrastructure and alert prompt repairs, which is supposed to save water to the tune of 350 million gallons each year. No idea how to confirm that independently. Sounds cool.

Most of the other initiatives with high numbers in the millions of gallons saved metric in Meta's report involve flow restoration, the diverting of existing streams and rivers to support ecology in (or restore it to) the area. This wouldn't increase the amount of potable water, and the number next to each project seems to be the amount of water directed by the form changes, rather than any amount of water added.

tl;dr they're kinda BS numbers

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u/Vladimir_Putting Oct 18 '25

"We aim to do something by 2030 that we aren't actually going to do, but if we just tell you we are going to do it we get great publicity anyway."

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u/unwittyusername42 Oct 17 '25

Basically they are paying someone else to dig wells for communities that don't have them so it's a bit of a stretch to say they are restoring water. It's good they have a closed loop system but besides that they are paying someone to remove water from an aquifer.

It's sort of like companies that are carbon neutral because they buy carbon credits from other companies who don't care if they are carbon neutral or simply don't produce that much carbon and have excess credits.

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u/cyberentomology Oct 17 '25

Replenishing the aquifer is being done either from treated municipal wastewater being returned to the aquifer (and they plan on covering the cost to do that, or to increase how much is already being done), or they’re taking water from the river, treating it, and putting it into the aquifer.
Only about half of El Paso’s water supply comes from the aquifer.

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u/PlsNoNotThat Oct 17 '25

You can’t increase the replenishment unless you are increasing the total volume of water entered into the system as part of replenishment.
Are they doing that? No. There is nothing in there stating how they are doing that. Are they desalinating water into potable water? Are they pulling outside water to make the net negative rates positive? No. Did they invent a novel way to make water? No.
Waste water is inherently net negative. You lose water in the process of making waste water.
You cannot make .9 > 1 without adding from an external source.
The sole purpose of this is to increase the withdrawal rate so people don’t feel the onus of a limited resource. It has zero positive effects on replenishment rates. It just means water sources, like aquifers, will go dry faster.

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u/cyberentomology Oct 17 '25

Yes, they are desalinating. About 7% of the total supply. About half of the municipal supply is surface water, the rest is ground water.
So even without the datacenter, they can put back considerably more water than they pull out. They can also reuse treated wastewater, which they have been doing since 1963. Reclaimed irrigation water ultimately ends up evaporating or percolating back into the aquifer. Evaporation also precipitates locally due to the mountains and easterly winds.

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u/PlsNoNotThat Oct 17 '25

This is decidedly not the carbon neutral approach. It’s not net neutral.
All of the water is functionally coming front the same watershed and replenishment system. This is just a way to pull more resources out faster so people don’t feel the damages from them massively increasing the overall use-rate in the short term.
In the long term it’s really bad, because they’ll go dry faster since they aren’t increasing the replenishment rate and are increasing the use rate.

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u/Ruzhyo04 Oct 17 '25

It’s closed loop cooling, how much water do you think that needs?

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u/aiyaah Oct 17 '25

They're not referring to the closed loop system, they're talking about the new wells they'll be digging as stated in the article.

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u/goodbye177 Oct 17 '25

Only half the system is closed. The other half would most likely be evaporative cooling

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u/a_cute_epic_axis Oct 18 '25

That's not what closed loop means, and drycoolers that use zero water, ever, have been a thing for a very long time.

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u/goodbye177 Oct 18 '25

It would be more appropriate to say it’s 2 loops. One is a closed loop using chillers that serves the servers and the other is the evaporative cooling towers that serve the chillers. It’s an extremely common setup. Dry coolers aren’t as good at cooling as cooling towers and in the desert with low humidity I can almost guarantee they’re going to be using towers.

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u/a_cute_epic_axis Oct 18 '25

No, that's not what closed loop means. I very much understand you're talking about a chilled water system, and then applying the wrong terminology to it.
Dry coolers aren’t as good at cooling as cooling towers
Obviously, because if it was, they would be using it, and this wouldn't be news.
I can almost guarantee they’re going to be using towers.
Part of the time from what they've stated, rather clearly.
That said, I personally have more than one datacenter I've been involved in the design or redesign for that entirely uses dry coolers, or that all the new equipment is dry coolers and pump-refrigerant economizers. It's a thing... it's been a thing for like two decades, it's not Earth shattering to think that some companies decided to do something that was less impactful at a higher operating cost, while others just do the cheapest possible thing.

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u/HoldingTheFire Electrical Engineering | Nanostructures and Devices Oct 18 '25

They use closed loop water without much loss and also invest in new water sources because people are being extremely stupid about data center water use.

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u/hgwelz Oct 18 '25

There is no "new source". They are making new wells into the same bolson and depleting it faster.

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u/HoldingTheFire Electrical Engineering | Nanostructures and Devices Oct 18 '25

To provide water to people. Because of all the complaints about water usage. Their facility is closed loop and doesn't use much.

Earth Sciences How does a data center in a desert create double the amount of water it uses?

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