Potential environmental impact: Google plans new data center in Chile
Google is rethinking its plans for a large data center in Chile due to water problems. The new project envisages air cooling.
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Google has decided to withdraw its planned data center project in Santiago de Chile due to negative environmental impact assessments by Chilean courts. The US technology company announced on Tuesday that it would redesign the initiative from scratch. Google's decision reflects growing concerns about the impact of power- and water-intensive tech projects around the world.
"Google will not continue with the approval process for the project to build a data center in the Cerrillos district, which was originally submitted and approved in 2020," the Chilean online newspaper El Periodista quoted from a letter from Google to the Chilean environmental authority. The company said it would reformulate the project and start the entire approval process from scratch in order to meet stricter environmental requirements and change its water-intensive cooling system. The new plans for the data center include an air cooling system that will allow the complex to be cooled without the use of large amounts of potable water.
Environmental concerns cause headwinds
Due to the increasing use of cloud-based technologies and the hype surrounding generative AI, the demand for server farms has risen sharply worldwide. Google received initial approval for the USD 200 million data center in Cerrillos, a municipality in the southwest of Santiago, the capital of Chile, at the beginning of 2020. But the project has since met with resistance from the population and local politicians due to its potential impact on the environment. Concerns about the high energy and water consumption of the air-conditioned computer farm prompted a Chilean court to temporarily revoke the official approval for the data center in February of this year.
The Santiago Environmental Court asked Google to address objections that the data center could affect Santiago's main water supply. In particular, the court noted that the project would use at least 7.6 million liters of groundwater per day to cool the servers, which would be unsustainable given the drought in the South American country. Google did not provide an updated timeline for the project, but stated that it intends to maintain the site.
(akn)
