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It was a well kept secret. How much water do Google data centers use for cooling each year? Until now, we could only rely on incomplete data or estimates to find out. Like in Oregon, where a local newspaper survey suggested that Google’s infrastructure in The Dalles used more than a quarter of the city’s water.

But while water scarcity is becoming a social problem, especially in summer and in regions affected by droughts and heat waves, pressure is increasing on industries that are large consumers of this public resource. Reason why Google, after having refined its communication strategy, has finally published some data.

We learn that, each year, more than 16 billion gallons of water are consumed by Google data centers in the United States for cooling. A consumption that the company tries to minimize, indicating that each data center consumes on average – every day – the amount of water necessary to irrigate seven hectares of lawn or to manufacture 160 cotton jeans (which each require from 7,000 to 10,000 liters of water ). Seen this way, in fact, it puts into perspective the 1.7 million liters used to cool a data center for 24 hours.

A once well kept secret

But the question arises as to why Google went to great lengths to keep this a secret for so long. According to comments by Ben Townsend, Head of Infrastructure at Google, in New scientist, it is because of the trade secret that this represents. This information could have been used to, to some extent, estimate the capacity of each of these data centers.

A priori this is no longer the case, as Google’s infrastructure has diversified, in terms of location, cooling technologies, etc. To put an end to the debates, the company has therefore decided to play on transparency, even at the cost of having to assume the damage control with lots of greenwashing.

Data submitted by Google shows that the top water-consuming center is Council Bluffs, Iowa, which alone consumes about 3 billion gallons of water annually. Google, however, is making an effort and, according to Aaron Wemhoff, a researcher at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, the company’s data centers have a lower water consumption than the American average, or 1.1 liters per kWh against 1.8 nationally. Which, of course, does not mean that water consumption in data centers around the world is not a problem, especially in light of the speed with which this infrastructure is developing.