Amazon to build new water storage plants next to its data centers for $34 million

Amazon Web Services is going to build three new water storage and treatment plants with which it hopes to achieve an improvement of up to 10% in consumption in the three data centers it has in the Community. In total, the multinational is going to invest more than 34 million euros in these facilities , which will not require an increase in the demand for drinking water or the amount discharged into the network, which will continue to comply with the authorized parameters at each location.

At the Villanueva de Gállego and Huesca facilities , the drinking water and industrial wastewater connections remain unchanged , while at El Burgo de Ebro , due to the location of the new treatment plant in the southwest of the plot, it is necessary to create new connection points on the western road.

Drinking water is required for cooling the data centre. This water is received from the public network and treated by a reverse osmosis process before being stored and subsequently used in the air handling units that provide cold air to the data rooms . The multinational recognises that climate change will lead to increasingly variable and extreme environmental conditions, and it is necessary, to ensure the continuity of operations, to implement measures that reduce dependence on public networks.

Currently, this treatment of incoming potable water is performed in a dedicated room within each of the two main data center buildings, Building A and Building B. In this modification, a new centralized water treatment building is proposed to house the reverse osmosis process equipment and ancillary filtration equipment necessary to service the buildings. The water treatment process itself remains the same , but centralizing the process in a single location on- site facilitates the reuse of wastewater from the data center buildings and thus increases overall water usage efficiency.

Additional storage tanks are also proposed at the central plant location to increase the system’s resilience to fluctuations in water availability in the public network and to limit demands on the network during periods of peak demand.