Google uses an average of 4.3 billion gallons of water to power its data centers each year. To address the environmental impact of that resource consumption, the cloud hyperscaler employs a few different strategies focused on water and data center sustainability in the hopes of improving data center water use across the technology industry, Ben Townsend, Google's head of infrastructure and water strategy told SDxCentral.

More than two years ago, Google started incubating ideas relating to the company's groundwater footprint and the uneven distribution of water stress around the globe. Those issues, Townsend explained, are "something we need to be paying attention to – not just from the perspective of being able to organize the world's data and possibly using Google technology tools to support water practitioners, but also [by] taking a really hard look at our own water footprint."

Google's analysis of why and how it uses water led to a three-pillar strategy that targets responsible water use at Google campuses and data centers, water replenishment in the communities it operates, and increasing access to Google tech and tools that help address global water stress.

The hyperscaler's responsible-use pillar focuses on how to make decisions about water use and communicate transparently. With this pillar, Google is aiming to "become leaders in showing what water risk monitoring and management looks like in a super transparent way," and so it might be replicated by other large corporations, Townsend said.

The second pillar represents Google's commitment to replenish 120% of the water it uses from the communities where its data centers are located. "You're using the resource," Townsend said, so "how are you investing in the resource so that its long-term health is bolstered by your presence?"

The third pillar of this corporate strategy stems from the view that even if Google is using its Maps application to support water security by democratizing evapotranspiration models, for example, there are still countries without an organization like the United States Geological Survey (USGS), whose research is a key contributor to those models. To address regions not represented by an organization with USGS' capabilities, this third pillar pushes Google to use its data and provide "something to help form a better understanding" of watershed behavior, he said.

But Google's data center business realized that technology sharing pillar can be applied to more than just the hydrologic space.

"Data centers are a massive opportunity to improve water security with technology," Townsend said. "That's where we started incubating and emphasizing our climate-conscious cooling strategy," which launched last year. This strategy "finds a way to integrate the more corporate-level pillars of responsible use, watershed health investment, but also [data center] cooling product innovation," he explained.

Townsend stressed the importance of being transparent with Google's metrics and collaborative in its explanation "so we're sharing our decision making with communities in a way they can understand," he said.

The separation between a growing infrastructure portfolio and "communities that don't understand why you're there and how you're participating – we don't think that's right. We want to be [an] open book and work with communities to form a shared understanding and progressively get more sustainable together," he said. "We're hoping to dare other corporates to be super transparent in the [level] of the challenge, but also the data behind it."

And as compute infrastructure continues to grow, issues like water, energy, building materials, social equity and digital racism need "to be folded in so we don't build this new generation of assets in the same way we were building steel mills and refineries and pulp and paper mills in the 1920s," he said, citing lessons learned in the past that "we cannot afford to forget."

Google's annual water usage represents the amount of water needed to irrigate and maintain 29 golf courses in the Southwestern U.S. The cloud provider aims to use freshwater alternatives like wastewater, industrial water and seawater when possible, and Google reported the use of reclaimed or non-potable water in at least 25% of its data centers.

By beginning a community relationship with "that hyper-transparent explanation of the trade-offs," including why Google monitors and reports site-level water use – "we're the first cloud provider to do it," Townsend touted – that "set the foundation for the transparency people from our generation just expect in the marketplace," he said.

And in terms of community water replenishment, Google prioritizes "well-informed investment roadmaps" that ensure "we're doing projects that ultimately prop up the watershed" and "benefit the entire community for a long time," he explained.

As a climate and environmental practitioner who has observed a "veil of secrecy" surrounding data center water use, Townsend is proud of Google's willingness "to be hyper-transparent around how and why we use water in the industrial space in general and data centers," he said.

The cloud provider's climate-conscious cooling strategy is a data-driven method of understanding local hydrology, geography, energy and emissions factors to limit the company's overall water footprint. By deciding which data center cooling tech works best for each site and balancing carbon-free energy with responsibly-sourced water, Google aims to limit its net climate impact.

And when pairing the three-pronged corporate strategy with the climate-conscious cooling roadmap, "we can start to be a lot more specific in our decision making and where we put our data centers, how we use water in those locations and how we pair watershed health investment with the co-benefits of waste and reused or reclaimed water projects," Townsend said.

"We at Google have known for quite a while that the energy efficiency that comes with responsible water-based cooling – 10% energy improvement, on average – that can translate into some serious carbon emissions reductions," he added. According to the cloud provider, water-cooled data centers use 10% less energy and emit 10% less carbon dioxide, which made possible Google's energy-related carbon footprint reduction of 300,000 tons of carbon emissions in 2021.

Google prioritizes "being super honest with the fact that on every single site, what's best for the watershed and best for the climate impacts is always going to look different," Townsend said. It's about "finding the balance" and determining if water is "an acceptable tool to be used in that area or not," he said. "There are very obvious signals that a watershed is healthy or not. And how are we listening to those signals?"

In regions where the hydrologic cycle is "out of balance or unhealthy, we have to pay close attention," he said. "This is going to continue to change as climate change drives acceleration in different parts of the hydrologic cycle. We have to be super careful that we're not coming into a watershed that's unhealthy and making it more unhealthy," he argued.

The convergence of Google's climate-conscious cooling and corporate water strategies aim to create a situation where Google shows up, becomes a water user in the community and "the hydrologic cycle here is so healthy that it almost doesn't even know that I'm here," he explained.

To that point, he said Google is finalizing a white paper on responsible water use that will walk data center developers through Google's decision-making process and its analysis of local hydrologic data so these strategies can be deployed widely outside Google. "I vetted the white paper with some folks at Stanford and some other [non-governmental organizations] who are saying if everybody took this approach, we would be solving the big crux of the water issue in the technology space," he touted.