In a nondescript building in an industrial park in central Mexico, cavernous rooms hold stack after stack of servers studded with blue lights, humming with computations and cooled by thousands of little fans and large vents blasting great columns of air across the room.
“Datacentres are the lungs of digital life,” says Amet Novillo, the managing director of Equinix Mexico, a digital infrastructure company, as he stands in the middle of the airflows that stop the hardware overheating.
Datacentres are clustering in the state of Querétaro, where Amazon, Microsoft and Google are among those lining up multibillion-dollar investments. Amazon alone has said it will invest $5bn. The government heralds the industry as a new driver of economic growth – but in a drought-prone state where the electrical grid suffered blackouts this summer, critics want to know how strained infrastructure will find the extra water and energy it needs.
Similar debates are playing out across Latin America, where datacentres are springing up to meet the needs of an expanding digital world.
A datacentre is, in essence, a warehouse filled with computers working around the clock. The servers require vast amounts of electricity, and some combination of air and water to keep them cool.
“Datacentres process our digital lives,” says Ana Valdivia, an AI expert at the Oxford Internet Institute, over the phone. “This call is being processed in a datacentre; every time we receive an email, that goes through a datacentre.”
Querétaro was already a hub for datacentres in Mexico, but this year Amazon, Google and Microsoft announced or launched their own installations there.
The Mexican Association of Data Centres estimates the pipeline of projects amounts to 600 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity – there are now 160MW of capacity in datacentres in Querétaro. But Adriana Rivera, its executive director, says this is “very conservative”: many companies don’t make the capacity of their datacentres public.
This is a boon for business in Querétaro. It creates a surge in construction and requires a network of suppliers to maintain and update the hardware. It also brings a limited number of well-paid jobs, and positions the state as a hi-tech hub.
“Querétaro is putting itself in the sights of the world,” says Marco Del Prete, the minister for sustainable development in Querétaro. “The economic benefit is tremendous.”
From the industry’s perspective, Querétaro offers safety and seismic stability close to Mexico City. Del Prete denies that the state government has provided public land or fiscal incentives to attract datacentre providers.
But what datacentres need most is reliable access to two essential elements: electricity and water. And water, in particular, is a tense issue in Querétaro.
The growth of Querétaro city and its industries, which include car and aerospace manufacturing, had already started to overstretch its underground aquifers two decades ago. The state government finished building a new aqueduct, Aqueduct II, in 2011 to pipe water for domestic use from Querétaro’s rural north-east to its urban centre, to allow the aquifers to recover.
But the city has kept growing, more industries have arrived – and the climate has changed. The drought this year was the worst this century.
Aqueduct II is already insufficient. Water is now limited in parts of the city during the dry season, and the increasing demands of industry mean the aquifers are also depleted.
Tensions came to a head last year in Maconí, through which Aqueduct II passes and where drought has meant springs the communities used to depend on no longer exist. For some, water must now be supplied by truck or by donkey.
“Last year, it hardly rained, and this year it hasn’t rained at all,” says Alejandro Ortiz, a community leader in Maconí, speaking in June. “This year has been the hottest I can remember.”
Local people say the state government reneged on a promise to supply their communities with piped water after it received their permission to build Aqueduct II. When they went to occupy the dam in protest, they were removed by security forces who arrested some of them, including Ortiz.
The communities marched to the city of Querétaro in October last year and conducted a sit-in in the Plaza de Armas square, which led to a new agreement with the state government, including on water provision. If the government does not keep its word, they promise to march again. “And this time not to Querétaro, but to Mexico City,” says Ortiz.
After the security forces removed the Maconí protestors occupying Aqueduct II, the state government acknowledged the communities’ need for water and claimed it was taking action to meet those needs.
Mauricio Kuri, the state governor from the conservative Pan party, has asked the opposition not to politicise the water issue and called for technical solutions, including constructing an additional aqueduct to bring water from the neighbouring state of Hidalgo.
However, the opposition accuses the state government of prioritising industrial water needs over those of its citizens. Gilberto Herrera, a deputy from the Morena party, says: “Your hotel won’t lack water. If you want to play golf for a week, you can; it will all be green.”
Meanwhile, in rural communities, “you will see people wash themselves with water that is neither clear nor clean”, says Herrera.
Kuri has accused Herrera and the opposition of spreading lies about the “privatisation of water” in Querétaro to win votes.
Now Querétaro’s booming datacentre sector is opening a new front in this debate. In the absence of public data, it is hard to accurately estimate a datacentre’s water needs, which depend on factors such as its MW of installed capacity or the cooling technology it uses. On average, a 1MW datacentre with a typical water-based cooling system may use about 25m litres of water a year.
According to this estimate, 600MW of new datacentres in Querétaro would imply 15bn litres of water a year, representing roughly 13% of the water use of the metropolitan area. However, if the datacentre employs a closed-loop system, this water may be reused, rather than being emitted as steam or ejected back into the water system.
Del Prete says most of Querétaro’s datacentres are “going towards” using closed water systems. “There is a loss of water, but not at the levels that some believe,” he says. “We don’t deny water is a factor: it is a necessity. But it’s not an impediment to setting up in Querétaro.”
Novillo says Equinix’s datacentres are connected to the municipal water network, but in a “100%” closed system – so the same water is reused indefinitely. Besides, he says, a datacentre’s water consumption is similar to any office building.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft declined to answer specific questions about the electricity and water needs of their planned datacentres in Querétaro, instead referring to company-wide plans to reduce their energy and water use.
Microsoft did not respond to requests for an interview or comment.
A Google spokesperson alleged that its “Google Cloud region” in Querétaro supports the company’s broader goal of operating on 24/7 carbon-free energy in every grid where it operates and aligning with its global goal of 100% renewable energy consumption. The company has not commented on water consumption.
Google also said its investments in Querétaro are expected to contribute $11.2bn to the country’s GDP and create over 117,000 jobs by 2030.
Amazon said: “At AWS, we know that water is a precious resource. We are committed to being water-positive by 2030 by returning more water to communities than we use in our data centre operations.” The company argued that, before building its infrastructure, it looked closely at the local climate conditions and water resources. “In Querétaro, we carefully analysed regional and local water availability before selecting an air-cooled datacentre design that will not require continuous use of cooling water in operations.”
Independent experts say it is technically possible for a datacentre to reuse the same water to cool the server continually. Still, more electricity is required to cool the water between uses, raising energy needs. Air-cooling systems are also more energy-intensive.
The problem is that 77% of Mexico’s electricity comes from burning fossil fuels in thermal power stations, which involves turning water into steam to move turbines.
“So there will be water consumption, and then obviously the carbon emissions associated with it,” says David Mytton, who researches sustainable computing at the University of Oxford. “They will inherit the carbon intensity of the local grid.”
According to Otto Van Geet, an engineer at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the public scrutiny of datacentres has incentivised companies to focus on reducing on-site water use, even if it means increasing overall water use when you include off-site electricity generation.
In a hot, dry place such as Querétaro, he suggests the ideal solution would be to use its abundant solar resources, and for datacentres to use closed-loop cooling systems that require less water but more electricity.
“Big solar, big batteries, 100% renewables, 100% of the time. Problem solved,” says Van Geet. “But that’s not the current state – that’s jumping ahead to where the industry has to go. When they build a new datacentre, they ought to build enough solar [to run it].”
Mexico remains a long way from this vision. The outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has favoured the state oil company over investment in renewables. It is unclear whether his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and a close ally of López Obrador, will change course.
In Europe, new regulations will soon require datacentres to report their electricity and water consumption. But in Mexico, there is little public debate about the costs and benefits of hosting datacentres. “We don’t know the numbers involved,” says Herrera.
Del Prete says it would be good to see similar regulations in Mexico, not just for transparency but for sustainability, too. “It’s important to be clear how much is being consumed to be able to improve – that is, reduce consumption.”