MESA, Ariz. — You could search for water at Google's planned $600 million data center in Mesa.
But you wouldn't get many results.
"The only water we're going to use on the whole campus is just for the office area," said Joe Kava, the executive who oversees Google's data centers worldwide.
"In the bathrooms and things like that to wash your hands."
Kava announced the company's new data center Wednesday with a surprise that drew applause: The giant server farm will be air-cooled - no water needed.
"When we go into any new community, we spend a lot of time evaluating the health of the watershed," Kava told reporters after the announcement.
"Our philosophy is to do no harm to the watershed."
The search engine giant's announcement in downtown Mesa was attended by Gov. Katie Hobbs, Congressman Greg Stanton and Mesa Mayor John Giles.
Data centers store all our digital stuff - emails, selfies, videos.
The data storage units demand massive amounts of energy and water, to run and cool them. In Arizona, that demand collides with the growing scarcity of water.
Kava declined to say how Google's air-cooling worked.
"My innovation team has been working on how we can use air-cooled solutions and make them as cost-effective as water-cooled," he said.
The Valley is fast becoming America's storage unit for the digital data we create.
By one measure, there are four dozen data centers in the state.
This will be Mesa's third data center.
Apple has been up and running for several years; Facebook parent Meta's data center is still under construction. All are in the Elliot Road Technology Corridor in east Mesa.
Sarah Porter, director of Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy, said that despite the extreme heat and drought, there were good reasons to build a data center in Arizona.
"While it may get really hot, we have a very stable climate," Porter said in an interview.
"We don't have earthquakes, we don't have hurricanes. We don't have devastating blizzards. And people want their data to be available when they need it."
But Porter said cities were starting to push back on the water demands of data centers.
"We have places where data centers want to build saying, 'Listen, the water's too big a problem, we have to figure something else out,'" she said.
"Now we're seeing data center builders coming in proposing to use no water or very low water cooling methods."
Porter also points out there's no free lunch.
Zero water use could mean a greater reliance on electricity to air-cool the data center. And electricity production itself relies on water.
The way Porter looks at it, all our data has a "water footprint."
"We all are pretty careless about our data storage," she said.
"You take a photo, it goes off to the Cloud, and that photo has a tiny water footprint. We don't think very much about that. But collectively, those footprints can be significant."
Google said construction of the data center could start by the beginning of 2024. An estimated 1,200 construction workers would be hired.
The company didn't provide any information on permanent jobs or salaries. Data centers are not large job generators.
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