How AI is Taking Water From the Desert (msn.com) 108
Microsoft built two datacenters west of Phoenix, with plans for seven more (serving, among other companies, OpenAI). "Microsoft has been adding data centers at a stupendous rate, spending more than $10 billion on cloud-computing capacity in every quarter of late," writes the Atlantic. "One semiconductor analyst called this "the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen."
But is this part of a concerning trend? Microsoft plans to absorb its excess heat with a steady flow of air and, as needed, evaporated drinking water. Use of the latter is projected to reach more than 50 million gallons every year. That might be a burden in the best of times. As of 2023, it seemed absurd. Phoenix had just endured its hottest summer ever, with 55 days of temperatures above 110 degrees. The weather strained electrical grids and compounded the effects of the worst drought the region has faced in more than a millennium. The Colorado River, which provides drinking water and hydropower throughout the region, has been dwindling. Farmers have already had to fallow fields, and a community on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix went without tap water for most of the year... [T]here were dozens of other facilities I could visit in the area, including those run by Apple, Amazon, Meta, and, soon, Google. Not too far from California, and with plenty of cheap land, Greater Phoenix is among the fastest-growing hubs in the U.S. for data centers....
Microsoft, the biggest tech firm on the planet, has made ambitious plans to tackle climate change. In 2020, it pledged to be carbon-negative (removing more carbon than it emits each year) and water-positive (replenishing more clean water than it consumes) by the end of the decade. But the company also made an all-encompassing commitment to OpenAI, the most important maker of large-scale AI models. In so doing, it helped kick off a global race to build and deploy one of the world's most resource-intensive digital technologies. Microsoft operates more than 300 data centers around the world, and in 2021 declared itself "on pace to build between 50 and 100 new datacenters each year for the foreseeable future...."
Researchers at UC Riverside estimated last year... that global AI demand could cause data centers to suck up 1.1 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons of freshwater by 2027. A separate study from a university in the Netherlands, this one peer-reviewed, found that AI servers' electricity demand could grow, over the same period, to be on the order of 100 terawatt hours per year, about as much as the entire annual consumption of Argentina or Sweden... [T]ensions over data centers' water use are cropping up not just in Arizona but also in Oregon, Uruguay, and England, among other places in the world.
The article points out that Microsoft "is transitioning some data centers, including those in Arizona, to designs that use less or no water, cooling themselves instead with giant fans." And an analysis (commissioned by Microsoft) on the impact of one building said it would use about 56 million gallons of drinking water each year, equivalent to the amount used by 670 families, according to the article. "In other words, a campus of servers pumping out ChatGPT replies from the Arizona desert is not about to make anyone go thirsty."
But is this part of a concerning trend? Microsoft plans to absorb its excess heat with a steady flow of air and, as needed, evaporated drinking water. Use of the latter is projected to reach more than 50 million gallons every year. That might be a burden in the best of times. As of 2023, it seemed absurd. Phoenix had just endured its hottest summer ever, with 55 days of temperatures above 110 degrees. The weather strained electrical grids and compounded the effects of the worst drought the region has faced in more than a millennium. The Colorado River, which provides drinking water and hydropower throughout the region, has been dwindling. Farmers have already had to fallow fields, and a community on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix went without tap water for most of the year... [T]here were dozens of other facilities I could visit in the area, including those run by Apple, Amazon, Meta, and, soon, Google. Not too far from California, and with plenty of cheap land, Greater Phoenix is among the fastest-growing hubs in the U.S. for data centers....
Microsoft, the biggest tech firm on the planet, has made ambitious plans to tackle climate change. In 2020, it pledged to be carbon-negative (removing more carbon than it emits each year) and water-positive (replenishing more clean water than it consumes) by the end of the decade. But the company also made an all-encompassing commitment to OpenAI, the most important maker of large-scale AI models. In so doing, it helped kick off a global race to build and deploy one of the world's most resource-intensive digital technologies. Microsoft operates more than 300 data centers around the world, and in 2021 declared itself "on pace to build between 50 and 100 new datacenters each year for the foreseeable future...."
Researchers at UC Riverside estimated last year... that global AI demand could cause data centers to suck up 1.1 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons of freshwater by 2027. A separate study from a university in the Netherlands, this one peer-reviewed, found that AI servers' electricity demand could grow, over the same period, to be on the order of 100 terawatt hours per year, about as much as the entire annual consumption of Argentina or Sweden... [T]ensions over data centers' water use are cropping up not just in Arizona but also in Oregon, Uruguay, and England, among other places in the world.
The article points out that Microsoft "is transitioning some data centers, including those in Arizona, to designs that use less or no water, cooling themselves instead with giant fans." And an analysis (commissioned by Microsoft) on the impact of one building said it would use about 56 million gallons of drinking water each year, equivalent to the amount used by 670 families, according to the article. "In other words, a campus of servers pumping out ChatGPT replies from the Arizona desert is not about to make anyone go thirsty."
What family (Score:4, Informative)
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Just calculated a Dutch family of 4's average annual water usage and converted that to US gallons, which gives 45,000 gallons / year. That's only off by a factor 2, not too insanely far out. But I'm sure they used the biggest number they could get away with.
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Just calculated a Dutch family of 4's average annual water usage and converted that to US gallons, which gives 45,000 gallons / year. That's only off by a factor 2, not too insanely far out. But I'm sure they used the biggest number they could get away with.
What numbers were you using. The average is 245L/day/household which comes to 26000 US Gallons/yr
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The real water whores. (Score:2)
If you’re wondering which “family” consumes water like that, don’t ask questions about the Almond Industrial Complex.
Fucking yuppies will attack you relentlessly protecting their milk alternatives. I’ve seen corn (ethanol) defended less.
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Corn is a staple crop, almonds are snacks.
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Corn is a staple crop..
Really? Is Government still paying farmers to not grow it? Hell of a “staple” mentality there.
..almonds are snacks.
Don’t look now, but that “snack” mafia is dictating your water costs from California.
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The government pays for a lot of things to not be grown to support the price. Like other staple crops like wheat, sorghum, etc. That doesn't change anything about my point.
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I don't know where you saw 12k per family per year, but that is way off. According to the EPA: "Each American uses an average of 82 gallons of water a day at home." For a family of four, that would be well over 100k gal/year.
I really don’t want to know how the EPA warped the definition of American so they could average out abuses for Each of them, but what in the FUCK have we actually accomplished with millions of “low” flow showerheads, tiny toilet tanks, and endless water restrictions? 82 gallons doesn’t sound like we’ve even made a dent.
Like every other “alarming” number, I want it compared to numbers half a century ago to prove it’s more than shitty clickbait feeding an agend
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The only 12,000 gallon figure I found was *monthly* use per household (of 4), from Rogers County, wherever that is:
https://rwd3rogers.com/documen... [rwd3rogers.com]
The EPA estimates "more than 300 gallons of water per day at home" which about 110k / year:
https://www.epa.gov/watersense... [epa.gov]
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It's also worth remembering that Phoenix has done a lot to actually conserve water. They had a committee focused on that topic since 1980s, and they make it prohibitively expensive for private entities to have natural lawns, swimming pools and so on. Supposedly among large cities, Phoenix has by far the lowest percentage of lawns in spite of having a lot of housing. They also have long required that new projects for building housing secure water for next 100 years. Recently they just stopped issuing permits
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What family uses 83,000 gallons of water a year? A quick search has the average family using 12,000 gallons a year, nearly 7 times less than this article claims. Based on that data, they use more like 4,690 families worth of water.
According to the EPA a below average one. I'm not sure where you get 12000gpyr from, but that is about half as much as what is used in some countries which are very water conscious, and the USA is not that.
https://www.epa.gov/watersense... [epa.gov] - 300 gpd = 109,000 gallons per year
I did find a figure which came to close to 12000 gallons per year per household (180gallons per week). That was on an EPA website for the estimated amount of water *wasted* per household just due to leaking faucets and fittings in the U
Why can't it be reused? (Score:2)
I've never understood why things like this are said to use a bazillion gallons of water for cooling.
Hot water cools off again when you stop heating it.
Why don't they just have a big cooling tank? Pump the hot water in one end, take the cool water out of the other end.
The technology for making these things has been around for a while.
You don't have to constantly refill the radiator in your car or the boiler that's heating your building.
Re:Why can't it be reused? (Score:4, Informative)
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Apparently that's the wrong technology for this purpose.
"It works but" means that it's not working as it should reasonably be expected to.
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So nothing ever, because everything has a "but"?
Re:Why can't it be reused? (Score:5, Informative)
As the other commenter noted: Evaporate cooling in cooling towers is reliable and dependable. And it is doubly dependable in extremely dry climates. The only trade off is you need water equal to your heat generation. And that water is on a one way trip. And this is easy to set up, you inject city water into the loop, cycle it through the cooling tower, let it evaporate and refill it with more city water.
The only way I could see "Dry coolers" working is to get water-to-water chillers operating that can discharge the heat rejection side to over 120F. But at that point, you might as well just go directly to direct expansion cooling. And the reason data centers don't use that is it is much more power intensive. Cooling towers are cheap to operate as long as you have an infinite supply of water.
Re: Why can't it be reused? (Score:1)
Why not run the potable water through a heat exchanger and return the city's water back to the city but slightly warmer? Use the city's water pipes as a giant reverse geothermal heat sink? Datacenters get cool servers, thousands of people get to take showers and flush their toilets. Everyone wins.
Re: Why can't it be reused? (Score:5, Informative)
For example: The city of Toronto uses a great lake for cooling for its NBA arena.
But if you wanted to use city water that you pull in and then reject back to the city to be used elsewhere. Lets assume you have a "small" data center with a 100 tons of cooling load (12,000 BTUs/hour *100) with a total of 12,000,000 BTU/hr. Water increases temperature at 1 degree F per pound of water, so (very roughly) 8 btus per gallon per degree. So lets assume we heat city water by ten degrees (that keeps us well below legionella). (insert a bit of math here I am not going to try to show in HTML): That means this "small" data center needs to pull 2,400 GPM, all the time. And the new water has to be reject its heat someplace or it is going to be pulled back into the data center having been warmed up. So at 4am when everyone is asleep and this data center is still operating, it is still going to be pulling 2,400 GPM and the water in those lines is going to get warm because no one is using the warm water.
And remember that all of this water you are piping around has to be piped as if it is potable water - because you are claiming it is still potable. That is likely to stomp on this right there. I suspect most city water managers are not going to allow anyone to inject untested water back into the drinking water supply for a city.
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And remember that all of this water you are piping around has to be piped as if it is potable water - because you are claiming it is still potable. That is likely to stomp on this right there. I suspect most city water managers are not going to allow anyone to inject untested water back into the drinking water supply for a city.
I don't think you understand how heat exchangers work, and your "untested water" is nothing more than a strawman since of all the engineering challenges which would be presented here the testing issue is one of the easiest to solve.
The idea for drinking water heating is not going to work, but the underlying principle is sound and actively used. There are many efficient datacentres that don't consume water, and do provide district heating / energy services from waste heat. Heck we covered one here early last
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>And that means you have to have chips that can withstand temperatures of 120F
Modern chips are pushing well over 100C. That's 212F. Their cooling water is usually around 50-60C in home AIO coolers that handle much lower heat loads than server farms.
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So the water is going to have to be 120F, possibly hotter than that. And that means you have to have chips that can withstand temperatures of 120F (or hotter).
Errr that's not bad for cooling water line. "Hot water" cooling systems do exist in many datacentres already since they are more efficient power wise. There are supercomputers in the top 5 list (to say nothing of the top 500) that are "hot water" cooled, and typical computer components can take this temperature quite easily too, especially the chips currently used for AI which don't suffer from the presence of a heat spreader. There are plenty of datacentres which run closed hot cooling loops already.
The on
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It does seem like you could cool things with gray water. I mean you'd have to make sure it was filtered so that fecal matter wasn't clogging nozzles, but that's a mechanical problem.
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That is how it's most certainly done. Especially in places like Phoenix, which have extreme amount of regulations on water. Waste water is going to be much cheaper than drinking grade one, or even one suitable for washing humans.
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Gray water would have to be treated, nearly to drinking water standards, to avoid having problems with corrosion or buildup of impurities on the inside of the mechanism. That increases the cost.
This is the problem with capitalism (Score:1, Insightful)
All these tech companies could cool their equipment without using water, but if it's slightly cheaper, they'll use water. This is why these companies need to be told what to do, not allowed to decide for themselves, when it comes to use of natural resources.
Honestly, though, server should be built to run in 100 (40C) ambient temperatures. It's really not that hard.
This is the problem with being short-sighted. (Score:2)
Honestly, though, server should be built to run in 100 (40C) ambient temperatures. It's really not that hard.
You’re wondering why they chose the not-so-hard route? Because it’s cheaper for them when maximizing their costs constructing a building that is specifically designed to cram as many servers inside as corruption will allow.
Honestly, you should have realized that.
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Because it's cheaper for them
In other words, water prices are too low.
Re:This is the problem with being short-sighted. (Score:5, Insightful)
From a strictly free-market point of view you're correct, of course. So let's think about the ramifications of that.
The current residents are using water. They're happy, their demand is pretty much on par with the supply, prices are low. Then the data center is built. Water prices are low so they decide to go with evaporative water cooling. Now the demand exceeds the supply. But it's a free market, so the prices go up. The company who owns the data center isn't concerned. Water is still priced less than alternative cooling systems. But now, the residents' water bills skyrocket. They're competing with a big company with deep pockets for a limited resource. The company can afford it. The people can't. Eventually people start moving away because they simply can't afford to live there. Yay, free market. Sure, the prices eventually stabilize but only after the demand decreases because so many people have left.
Or heck, why stop there? The water is from a river, right? Who says it belongs to the townies? Let's just locate the pumps upstream from the town and divert it all to the data center. In a free market, isn't that a smart idea? Why pay someone else for a resource that they're just scooping up from the environment when you can go out and scoop it up for yourself? (We'll just ignore the fact that the Colorado River is already the subject of tons of treaties and regulations shackling the power of the invisible hand. Those are bad things, right?)
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I'm assuming that water is provided by a utility.
The current residents are using water.
There will be different classes of service. With different, regulated prices. Residential and small business users are pretty well protected. Large industrial users, not so much. Agricultural users are usually grandfathered in under water rights treaties. So the bidding for large blocks of water will be between industrial users. And that's all done in a regulated environment. A new connection request is received with a usage estimate. A price is quoted accord
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Or heck, why stop there? The water is from a river, right? Who says it belongs to the townies?
The trouble is that even if you say it does belong to the townies, big data centre comes along and waves a big cheque in front of enough of the townies that they sell up. They then go and live it up for a few years, before realising they have now spent all the money and no longer have any water. At that point they start grumbling about how big business is ruining everything.
I'm not trying to defend big business, but I'm just pointing out that individual are pretty stupid as well, and many times it's hard to
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And that means having huge fans that can draw enough hot air over those chips, and having racks optimized for air flow.
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No one is air cooling GPU/AI accelerator chips. It's been water cooling for at least a decade in data centers. Heat loads are far too much for air cooling.
You can just look up nvidia's AI accelerator cards, they come with industry standard water input and output ports.
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That's what I said, yes. And no, it doesn't need "entirely different approach to cooling". We have industry standard piping systems for water cooling, and most data center GPU cards come in a very specific and well defined form factor in terms of dimensions, and with specific ports for cooling water intake and exhaust.
These are fit into standard sized racks with pumps and piping for that standard cooling. It's very similar to a lot of custom loop PC cooling stuff you see in high end consumer market, just fu
Re: This is the problem with capitalism (Score:2)
If you have an 8 way SXM box with H100s then they are *ALL* aircooled. Its fing crazy but Nvidia supply the SXM module and it comes with an integrated heatsink. I have had quotes from all the major vendors at the start of this year and it was surprise to us we assumed we would be able to get direct liquid cooled servers. You can for four way SXM but not eight way.
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Honestly, though, server should be built to run in 100 (40C) ambient temperatures. It's really not that hard.
Yeah, just change the way physics works. Anybody know Q?
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if it's slightly cheaper, they'll use water.
Is that wrong? I don't know the situation in Phoenix, but using electricity for refrigeration probably releases more CO2 than using water. It might be more environmentally friendly to divert water from crops to evaporative cooling. Anyone care to math it out?
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Honestly, though, server should be built to run in 100 (40C) ambient temperatures. It's really not that hard.
Servers are built to run at temperatures like that. The problem starts happening when you start putting them closer together, next to other servers, in a room. There's no free lunch. If you want more air cooling with higher ambient temperatures you need to increase the datacentre footprint. Something has to give when you trade away any variable in a design.
On the up side ... (Score:2)
Probably no war with Skynet -- we'll all simply die of thirst. The machines win w/o firing a shot.
Re:On the up side ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps this is the war with Skynet.
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It’s pretty pathetic when our 1990s vision of humanity’s resistance, can’t even manage to get out of fucking bed to prove otherwise.
Given the inexplicable shit we dig from the sands of time, we don’t even realize how stupid we actually are as a species..failing to recognize we’ve been dumb enough to damn near extinct ourselves before. Probably more than once.
If that’s our “up” side, we deserve or own fate.
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I blame GolfNet.
It's fine (Score:3)
If these states gave a shit about their people they'd pass laws to ensure residents have enough drinking water. They have never, and never will. The citizens in those states voted in those elected officials. So it's really their own fault.
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I’m sorry, but what are you blaming again? The system, or the citizens held hostage by it?
You act as if American corruption, is enabling alternatives.
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Arizona does have laws requiring all municipalities in the state to have plans detailing how they will have water for at least 100 years before they are allowed to develop. (there are some loopholes for what are referred to as maverick communities - where they are not incorporated in a township - but politicians are in fact debating how to close those loopholes)
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Phoenix had regulation to ensure this since 1980s. They even have a rule in place where any new residential development must get certification that they have secured enough water for entire development for next hundred years after being built. Right now, they don't even allow developers to get permits for new housing without securing that.
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They have different needs, as they take waste water from residential. So as any sane regulatory system, they go under a different regulatory framework. For example, they would be required to take waste water, reuse it and not emit it out once it's used up without significant treatment.
Would this sort of a regulatory regime meet your criteria for a "free pass"?
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All the News that's Fit to Twist and Bend (Score:3, Informative)
>and a community on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix went without tap water for most of the year...
That certainly sounds dire, doesn't it? The story there is that the community was previously using water that was not allocated to it, had plenty of time to get that cleared up, and decided to just ignore the problem. It was a totally self-inflicted issue caused by complacent stupidity.
Of course, Arizona is Republican territory, so.
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Of course, Arizona is Republican territory, so.
Only the crazier parts of it - remember, Biden won the state (and the loonies lived up to their name).
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>Of course, Arizona is Republican territory, so.
Let's fact check that "informative" post.
Current AZ governor? D. Secretary of State? D. Attorney General? D. Senate and house? R led by two votes each. State Senators? Two Ds (well technically Ds ran one of them out of the party chasing her across toilets in Washington, unironically, but that's another story). Presidential vote? D.
Reminder: Phoenix is one of the main targets for "fuck the outcome of policies I voted for in California, I'm out" flight of Ds
Why the Desert? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Tax breaks and handouts from local governments.
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Cheap land prices, no neighbors to annoy, low regulation.
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Same reason you'd build a giant city there. And a bunch of chip fabs too.
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Cheap land. Cheap power. Massive population growth. Well educated. 5th largest city in the nation. Access to nearby California's IT sector, and massive pool of its workers fleeing California right now.
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Data is cheap and easy to move
You're only saying that because you're not doing it at scale. There are whole companies whose core business revolve exclusively around putting that data local to the user in order to minimise this cost.
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You're only saying that because you're not doing it at scale.
I've worked on experiments with hundreds of petabytes of data. With large datasets like that you are not moving the bulk of the data itself around but rather you migrate the jobs to the bulk data, run your process and transfer the far smaller processed output back. Transferring the bulk data may take a little while but you only ever do that once. This lets you put your data centres anywhere in the world with a decent network connection.
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Why on earth would you build a data centre somewhere as hot as Arizona?
Phoenix is a major connection point for fiber.
Phoenix, eh? (Score:1)
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The problem is the energy is diffuse. In order to boil the water in order to desalinate, you need a way to concentrate that energy.
The servers seem to be doing that just by operating. The real question would be how to transfer the heat efficiently from the circuits to the water when you're starting with salt water, without shorting or corroding the circuits.
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2. Water boils at 212F (before adjusting for elevation).
3. In order to boil the water the water has to be heated to 212F, so the chips either have to be able to operate at 212F (which I don't think is a design constraint right now) or the water temperature has to be raised with a mechanical process. That means high temperature chillers that can provide the needed cooling, while raising the water temperatur
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For the metrically challenged, that is around 3.8 kWh per 1000 US gallons.
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Non-technical articles appealing to non-technical people.
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Nah, build my faster than light starship first. Come on, engineering companies!
Geewillikers (Score:2)
There's just nothin' AI can't do.
They use way more water to grow grass for Saudis (Score:2)
AI and crypto are both parasitic. (Score:2)
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Maybe I'm Missing Something (Score:1)
Can someone please explain how a data center "consumes" water?
While we're at it, by what process (aside from photosynthesis and electrolysis) does anything on this planet "consume" water? Water is cyclical. If it were being destroyed, there would be no life on Earth.
Carbon Neutral or Envioromental Castrophie (Score:2)
Build it on a mountain (Score:2)
That's what we did. We built one of the world's largest datacenters in 2013 with a capacity of 34 Petabytes and at a cost of 100 million on top of our highest mountain, which has always been one of the main attractions in Portugal. Now it's old and for sale. Sic transit gloria mundi. Soon you'll be able to store 34 petabytes on your desk.
The cloud or the clouds (Score:2)
Bias warning, I work for Microsoft, but I'm ignorant of this area generally.
The vast majority of Microsoft's data centers are for Azure cloud services. These replace capacity in customer data centers. If that's correct, shouldn't we include a comparison to water and power usage in those facilities? My intuition is profit motive and economies of scale would drive cloud DCs to be significantly more efficient than enterprise DCs.
Re:Alas (Score:5, Informative)
So long as the renewed part equals or exceeds the used part, no problem. But in your blithe, pitiful attempt to shrug away the issue, that's not what's happening. As mentioned in the blurb, the Colorado River, which feeds down to Arizona, is drying up. Last year they lucked out and got a wet winter which helped replenish some of the water in Lake Powell, but levels are still historically low.
Take into consideration Saudi Arabia [cbsnews.com] and the UAE [cnn.com] are draining aquifers left and right as they grow then ship alfalfa back to their countries for their cattle, and combine that with these datacenters which will equally drain both aquifers and anything coming from the Colorado, and the continuing growth of Arizona cities such as Phoenix and Scottsdale [npr.org], and renewable is just a word. No environment can sustain this much depletion year after year.
Re:Alas (Score:4, Interesting)
1. It's downstream over-allocation
2. Agriculture has 80% of that allotment
3. Big scary evil datacenter use is a small fraction, and unlike agriculture that water is returned in a closed loop
This article is idiotic and you were suckered in
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Yeah, even golf courses use more water per day than this data center uses per year. Mind, AI is an extravagance and should be penalized as long as it doesn't have a socially useful use case, but that's for a host of reasons beyond water use. Golf courses and growing alfalfa in a desert should be much higher on the chopping block for water use.
Re:Alas (Score:4, Interesting)
"Yeah, even golf courses use more water per day than this data center uses per year."
An average golf course uses 200M gallons PER YEAR, so you are off by two orders of magnitude.
"Golf courses and growing alfalfa in a desert should be much higher on the chopping block for water use."
There's a whole lot of data missing to support this argument and what little you provided is grossly, even comically, in error.
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"Uhm actually a single golf course uses less water than all AI data centers"
Re:Alas (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Alas (Score:5, Informative)
and unlike agriculture that water is returned in a closed loop
I think you mis-read what was meant by 'closed-loop'. The water is evaporated to cool the (heated) cooling fluid that is pulling heat from the data center. The only 'closed loop' is the cooling fluid that runs from the heat exchanger to the data center.
Re: Alas (Score:3, Interesting)
This!
"50 MILLION GALLONS ZOMG!!!"makes for a scary sounding number, until you run the math and realize that's what Arizona farmers use to irrigate 30 acres / 12 hectares of alfalfa. It's nothing.
This is ragebaiting, plain and simple, to fish for clicks from the anti-AI crowd.
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Re: Alas (Score:2)
Evaporative cooling water is not returned in a closed loop. I'd be shocked if it's even legal for these centers to use evaporative cooling in Phoenix AZ but if the article is correct about that, this is a problem.
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It's not for cows (Score:4, Interesting)
The crazy thing is Az is still growing. It's nuts. There's zero long term planning for water but it's a purple state so you get the well run gov't and solid energy grid of a blue state and the low taxes and lax regulations of a red state. It won't last, since it's purple, but like has been predicted when that happens companies just move again, and we let 'em because reasons.
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UAE is building desalination plants to get more potable water.
https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news... [msn.com]
UAE is building nuclear power plants to provide the power needed for desalination.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone... [msn.com]
Arizona is a landlocked state so they don't have the option to act on their own for desalination of seawater for water to drink. What they can do though is do something about the supply of energy for desalination. Arizona already has a very large nuclear power plant, perhaps they can add more capaci
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Absolutely! Perfect for solar power. Of course, to desalinate water you need salt water.
[Looks at map of USA] Hmm.... I've detected a small problem to your proposed solution sir!
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Also, many places you can find salty groundwater.
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Arizona has been offered (past tense, offer has already been made) an option of a desalination plant in Gulf of California, and water be piped to Mexico. By the main builder of desalination plants in Israel.
Problem is that costs of water for that project are utterly insane compared to just taking it out of the Gila river and underwater aquifers.
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Not according to Slashdot. The votes have spoken