The hidden water and energy dependency of our digital society

The amount of data created and stored globally is expected to reach 175 Zettabytes by 2025, representing nearly a six-fold increase from 2018. A significant and growing proportion of these data are centralized within data centers, which are used to store, manage, and distribute data among various users. Data centers require a tremendous amount of energy to operate and represent one of the largest energy users in the United States, responsible for almost 2% of the nation's overall electricity usage. Large amounts of water are also required to operate data centers, both directly for space cooling to dissipate excess heat and indirectly to produce electricity since most forms of electricity production use significant amounts of water. Here, we calculate the carbon and water footprints of data centers within the United States, which is home to around one-quarter of all data center servers globally. Our spatially-detailed, bottom-up approach reveals one-fifth of data centers' direct water footprint comes from medium to highly water stressed watersheds, while nearly half of data centers are fully or partially powered by power plants located within water stressed watersheds. We investigate tradeoffs and synergies between a data center's water and energy utilization by testing scenarios that shift to more efficient operational sizes and introduce different server configurations and cooling technologies. Our study quantifies the environmental implications behind our data creation and storage and shows a path to decrease the environmental footprint of our increasing digital footprint.