Rising water demands amid influx of data centers, Alliance for the Great Lakes 

ST. JOSEPH COUNTY, Ind.-- A new report from the Alliance for the Great Lakes is sounding the alarm bell that the Great Lakes region is not ready for the water demands of big industry, like data centers to power artificial intelligence.

In New Carlisle, groundwater from the Kankakee Aquifer is the town's drinking water source. It's also the source for local farmers' wells and irrigation systems. Now, it also supplies the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center being built.

Can the aquifer sustain all this pressure, and how can we maintain its supply? These are the issues addressed in that report, and on Friday, ABC57's Annie Kate spoke with the author, Helena Volzer, senior source water policy manager at the Alliance for the Great Lakes (AGL).

"It's not just one data center proposal; it's kind of stepping back and looking at this in the aggregate," Volzer said. "How is the influx of these data centers, which are large water users, going to impact regions?"

Regions like Western St. Joseph County, where the AWS data center is steadily coming online near New Carlisle.

"Where there's an EV battery plant and a data center, and it's suspected that during the dewater process, that's when the groundwater's pumped out, to make space for these facilities, that that had impacted residents' wells," Volzer said.

And regions like Eastern St. Joseph County, where Microsoft's data center is in the planning stages.

"The takeaway is we need better regional planning to inform our demand predictions and make our economic development decisions about where to site data centers or other large water users," Volzer said.

Hyperscale data centers, like what AWS and Microsoft are building, use what 12,000 Americans would use in a year, as Volzer highlights in her report. This is especially true when the data centers use a process called "evaporative cooling."

"In that evaporative process, though, that's called consumptive use, and that's where the water that's evaporated doesn't necessarily return to the watershed, and it's sort of lost in the process," Volzer said. "When evaporative cooling is used, more than half of that water is lost to consumptive use. And that's what makes data centers a consumptive water user."

This, on top of public drinking water usage and irrigation practices.

"What we really found is that water's not really being considered holistically when making these siting decisions," Volzer said. "So that's one of the major recommendations in the report is to undertake some more regional demand planning."

Indiana Governor Mike Braun signed this executive order April 21st, calling on the Secretary of Energy and Natural Resources to conduct a thorough inventory of Indiana's water resources and usage.

"If you max out all of your water resources on data centers, which don't bring a lot of jobs, and then being ready for that second wave of economic development, how are you going to do that if your water resources are now stretched?" Volzer said. "You can't have a 'blue economy' if you don't have water."

Read the full report here* or view a factsheet here. 

View the ABC57 special report, "The Silicon Prairie: Water Worries."

https://www.abc57.com/news/the-silicon-prairie-water-worries