"THE US IS FACING SIGNIFICANT STRAINS ON ITS WATER SUPPLY" - JPMorgan Chase & Co Report - October 2024
Already overstretched, US water resources, are being further stressed by the boom in artificial intelligence.
Titled The Future of Water Resilience in the US., the research shows how the growth of AI, which requires vast amounts of water to cool power-hungry data centers and for semiconductor manufacturing, is bumping up against the reality of climate change. The upshot is that a surge in demand is colliding with less reliable precipitation patterns, leading to dangerous water shortages.
Large data centers can use as much as 5 million gallons of water a day, which is roughly the same amount as is used by a town of up to 50,000 people. That’s on top of the billions of gallons of water needed to enable the manufacture of semiconductor chips.
A mishandling of water risk could cause “real disruptions to global supply chains, with particular implications emerging from the rapid growth of AI,” the report’s authors wrote. Water is “essential” to both semiconductor manufacturing and data-center cooling operations, two “crucial AI-related business activities.”
The research also found that increased migration to warmer, water-stressed areas like Arizona, as well as the re-shoring of manufacturing tasks once outsourced to other countries, is adding to the water crisis in the US.
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