Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID AZ-2024_Ravikumar

Determining the water footprint of cooling datacenters in Maricopa County

Institute: Arizona
Year Established: 2025 Start Date: 2026-01-01 End Date: 2026-12-31
Total Federal Funds: $10,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $10,000

Principal Investigators: Dr Dwarakanath Ravikumar

Project Summary: The datacenter capacity in Phoenix is the fourth largest in North America, the second largest in the USA and is expected to grow by 19% till 2030. The significant water footprint of datacenter operations can exacerbate the existing water stress in Maricopa county and AZ state. Due to the reluctance of datacenter owners to share proprietary and sensitive water consumption data, there is a lack of robust estimates of water used to cool datacenters in Maricopa County. The proposed will be the first to provide a publicly available model and estimates of the water used to cool datacenters in Maricopa County. The model will help policy makers and industry to plan for the water requirements of future datacenter capacity expansions in Maricopa County and the estimated water losses can provide a rationale for state agencies to fund research and technology development on decreasing water losses in datacenters.