A different kind of internet thirst trap
The cloud that's sucking up London's water
Exactly one year ago, we wrote an issue about the fact that property developers in west London were being told they wouldn’t be able to build any new houses for at least the next ten years because the electricity grid had “run out of capacity to support new homes”.
The source of the problem was data centres in the Thames Valley that were hoovering up electrical capacity and leaving the grid unable to guarantee power for badly-needed new homes. At the time it was reported that there were around 50 different housing projects effected, including some that were part of the Affordable Homes Programme.
A few months later Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks announced that it had reached an “innovative whole system solution” with the National Grid that would allow “smaller demand” housing projects to go ahead. That didn’t help the hospitals and electric vehicle charging points across west London though, they still faced an uncertain future.
But it seems that data centres aren’t just power hungry. They’re thirsty too.
That’s right. The internet is coming for your water.
As if Thames Water doesn’t have enough to sort out, a few days ago the company had to announce that it is now thinking about reducing the amount of water that data centres can use, either by adding ‘flow restrictor’ to pipes or by charging them more at peak times.
But how much water can a data centre use? Well, luckily, Google released their annual environmental report earlier this month, and in there they reported that their data centres had slurped up 5.2 billion gallons of water in 2022. That’s 20% up on the previous year.
That jump in use is entirely down to the increased use of AI. The University of California recently published some research which estimated that ChatGPT needs to “drink” a 500ml bottle of water to answer a string of 20-50 queries. Think about that the next time you ask Midjourney to create a picture of cat playing the drums in the style of Van Gogh.
Microsoft has already been caught out for its wildly inaccurate estimates of how much water is needed to cool their data centre in Middenmeer, Holland. And a few weeks ago there were protests in southern Uruguay after Google bought land for a new data centre there, “that will use millions of litres of water a day”. Uruguay is right now suffering its worst drought in 74 years.
Last year, Robert Goodwill (who is the Conservative chair of the House of Commons environment, food and rural affairs select committee) called for an investigation into the impact of data centres on water supplies. “We need to figure out what their demands will be and what the impacts will be on other consumers,” he said.
So far, there has been little to no figuring out. Mainly because companies like Google and Microsoft aren’t all that keen on disclosing just how much electricity and water their data centres use up, or even where some of those data centres are.
Meanwhile, at a former paint factory in Slough (which is already home to the world’s second largest data centre hub) an £800 million data centre development is underway by a company called Cathexis Holdings - the same company that built that Microsoft data centre in Holland and claimed it would use 12m to 20m litres per year, when it ended up using 84 million litres.
Right now, the forecast for the rest of the summer is for no heatwave, and the ‘unsettled’ July weather has let Thames Water swerves a hosepipe ban. But with the likelihood of temperatures “exceeding 40C somewhere in the UK in a given year” increasing all the time, the chances are that it won’t be long before we find ourselves in a battle with artificial intelligence over our most precious and vital resources (not a sentence we could have imagined ourselves writing a year ago).
Here’s a picture of a cat playing the drums to cheer you up…
5 Little Bits
Talking of west London housing developments… The PM was at one of those on Friday to promote an announcement that the government “is spending £200m on housing initiatives in the capital”. In an accompanying (and unusually party-political) press release, Number 10 said that £150m of the money had to be allocated to London boroughs, because “the mayor has failed to deliver the homes that London needs.” Khan came out swinging, replying to Sunak’s tweet with “Are you the same guy who dropped his house building targets? Because I’m the guy who started building more council homes than the rest of England combined, exceeded your affordable homes targets & built more homes of any kind than since the 1930s.” He also called the PM’s press release “desperate nonsense”. (In related news: This disused stairwell could be yours for just £20,000.)
The City of London police put out an appeal to black cab drivers on Friday after a father left an urn containing his child’s ashes in the back of a cab. The general secretary of the London cab drivers’ trade union, responded by saying “I’m not in the slightest bit surprised… The stuff that gets left in cabs is literally beggars belief. We’ve had babies and tens of thousands in cash.”
A new report from Trust for London has shown that “one in four Londoners are in poverty”. The charity’s research puts the poverty rate for Black Londoners at 38%, “a massive 20 percentage points higher than white Londoners, who have a poverty rate of 18%”.
The Horniman Museum has been given £5.7m by The National Lottery towards its £10m ‘Nature + Love’ project. The money will go towards redeveloping the Natural History Gallery, creating an “Action Zone focused on local wildlife with interactive elements designed for families with young children” and transforming two “currently under-used areas” of the museums’ gardens.
Esquire has a profile on Edward Sexton, the Dagenham-born Savile Row tailor who died last week. Sexton “redefined the codes of British tailoring” in the 60s and 70s (three out of the four Beatles are wearing Edward Sexton suits on the cover of Abbey Road).