How much water will Meta’s data center in Idaho use? The answer might surprise you
The announcement last month that Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, would build a 960,000-square-foot data center at the intersection of Cole and Kuna Mora roads in Kuna was met with great fanfare.
The center represents an $800 million investment, bringing 1,200 construction jobs and 100 permanent jobs.
But one of the big concerns is water, which data centers need for cooling.
It’s been reported that some data centers use as much as 3 million to 5 million gallons of water per day — the equivalent of a city of 30,000 to 50,000 people, according to a recent article by NBC News. Google last year requested 1.46 billion gallons of water a year, or 4 million gallons a day, for a new data center in Red Oak, Texas, according to Bloomberg News.
One study put the average data center at 1 million gallons of water a day, or the equivalent of 3,333 households. That’s about half the size of the city of Kuna, which has about 6,200 households.
Some cities, particularly in drought-prone areas of the country, such as the arid West and dry Southwest, are pushing back on approving data centers over water worries.
But the data center in Kuna is expected to use only 70,000 gallons of water per day on average, according to Meta spokesperson Melanie Roe. That would be the equivalent of about 230 households, which would be — forgive the pun — a drop in the bucket.
Roe said Meta has designed its data centers to use 80% less water on average than the industry standard — including the Kuna center.
‘Water positive’ goal
Facebook made an announcement in August that it has a goal of being “water positive” by 2030.
“This means Facebook will return more water to the environment than we consumed for our global operations,” according to the announcement.
Although Meta has not announced any plans for a water restoration project in Idaho, the company has launched several such projects across the country and reported restoring about 595 million gallons of water in 2020, with a potential to restore 850 million gallons of water per year.
Virginia Tech doctoral student A.B. Siddik, who was the lead author on a paper looking at the environmental impact of data centers in the U.S., estimated that a 960,000-square-foot data center with advanced cooling systems would consume almost half a million gallons of water per day.
However, hyperscale data centers, like the one in Kuna, use proprietary systems that combine cooling technologies and local climate conditions, Siddik wrote in an email to the Idaho Statesman.
That’s something Roe pointed out, adding that the climate in Idaho will allow Meta to cool the Kuna data center with outdoor air for more than half the year.
“Over the last decade, these technologies, including allowing our data centers to be cooled with outside air, have enabled our data centers to operate 80% more water efficiently on average compared to the industry standard,” Facebook wrote in a release in August. “And we see opportunities for additional gains in the coming years, particularly as our infrastructure grows, and we’ll need to develop water-efficient designs for different climates. “
A proposed 2.7 million-square-foot data center in South Korea is planning to use the climate in Sejong to cool the center 72% of the year, according to an article in Data Center Dynamics.
Meta’s water rights
So where will Meta’s water come from?
Roe said the company will use the water rights that came with the land the company purchased, and there would be no need to apply for new water rights.
“Our project will not increase the demand on the aquifer, as no new rights were created,” Roe wrote in an email to the Statesman.
Meta owns four parcels of land for a total of 485 acres, according to land records with the Ada County Assessor’s Office.
Each of those parcels came with water rights of varying types, amounts and original owners.
Roe said Meta would not share its water rights information, but the Idaho Department of Water Resources was able to locate the individual water rights that are associated with the parcels. There are seven separate water rights, some dating back to the 1960s, with original owners that included Iowa Beef Processors and longtime farm families.
Combined, the water rights amount to a total of 12.6 cubic feet per second, which is 6.8 million gallons per day.
However, not all of those water rights are designated as industrial. In all, 2.2 cfs is designated industrial and 3.2 cfs is designated commercial, with the rest designated for irrigation, domestic and stockwater.
If Meta were to use just the commercial- and industrial-designated allotments, that would be 5.4 cfs, which is the equivalent of about 3 million gallons per day, more than enough for its purposes.
Meta will build water and wastewater facilities on 160 acres of land in the park and convey them to the city of Kuna, according to a development agreement the city and Meta signed in December.
The industrial park still sits about 4 or 5 miles from the nearest water and sewer main lines, Kuna Mayor Joe Stear told me in a phone interview.
Ideally, the city would like to loop in the industrial park water facility with the city water system at some point, but the wastewater facility likely would be reserved solely for the park as it develops, Stear said.
More to come?
Meta said the Kuna center would be its 15th in the U.S. and 19th in the world to help support Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other services.
Facebook built its first data center in Prineville, Oregon, in 2009. Prineville, a rural town of about 10,000 people, is now home to nine data centers, with two more scheduled to open next year.
The company operates 18 data centers, spanning more than 40 million square feet of data center space, including 34.2 million square feet of campus capacity in the U.S., and 5.4 million square feet of global space planned for sites in Ireland, Sweden, Denmark and Singapore, according to an article in Data Center Frontier.
It’s probably worth noting that a 960,000-square-foot building takes up about 22 acres of land, a mere fraction of the total 485 acres Meta purchased out there.
Meta’s campus in Altoona, Iowa, will become its largest cloud campus with the addition of two new data centers, according to Data Center Frontier. The new capacity will boost Altoona to more than 5 million square feet of data center space, pushing it past the company’s Prineville campus (4.6 million square feet).
The Facebook Altoona data center campus is 202 acres.
Could Meta’s data center be but the first of many more to come?
“I think we will have to look at water usage and figuring out exactly how that all plays out,” Stear said. “I think water usage is probably one of the biggest things we look at.”
This story was originally published March 11, 2022 at 4:00 AM.
