We all know that the cloud consumes a lot of energy. But there is another problem: water. This is becoming increasingly scarce, and data centers also use a lot of it. That doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.
It all seems so disembodied. As if the cloud in which online orders are processed, holiday photos are saved and cat videos are played out, as if it were a cloud similar to those that float in the sky. But anyone who has ever looked into a data center quickly realizes that reality is anything but weightless. Shelves with server computers are lined up endlessly in huge halls. The noise is deafening. The power consumption of large data centers corresponds to that of a small town. And the more digital the world becomes, the more such data centers need to be built. In the USA, where most of them are located, they are already responsible for two percent of total electricity consumption, in the EU it was even 2.7 percent in 2018.