Water-Wise Computing: Addressing Data Center Water Consumption for a Sustainable Future

Water, the key to life, is one of the earth's abundantly available elements. Yet access to freshwater is extremely limited and unevenly distributed, especially made worse with today's de-teriorating climate conditions, growing population, and aging water infrastructure [5]. The global water scarcity problem calls for every industry sector to actively contribute to water sustainability efforts. To that end, data centers with their scale and critical role in today's digital infrastructures, can, and also should, lead by example. Unfortunately, however, while data center operations achieved remarkable progress over the years in energy and carbon efficiency improvements, the water footprint of data centers has remained under the radar for much of the past decade. To that end, our goal in this paper is to shed light on data center water consumption and operational strategies that can improve data center sustainability