Water courses through a series of little outdoor ponds at the Douglas County water treatment plant, where it’s filtered before heading to sinks and toilets, schools, homes, restaurants and hospitals.
“Our water comes from the Dog River Reservoir,” said Gil Shearouse, the executive director of the Douglasville-Douglas County Water & Sewer Authority.
He said the county has to think about the water supply.
Right now, they’re planning a $390 million upgrade to expand the reservoir, not just for population growth, but primarily to be better prepared for droughts.
“Droughts are getting worse. They’re getting more severe. They’re getting more frequent,” Shearouse said.
Data center water usage
But as Douglas County plans for the future, a new kind of business hopes to slurp up gallons upon gallons of that water right now: data centers.
These facilities use huge amounts of water to cool off their constantly running servers, so utilities across metro Atlanta are crunching their numbers as data center developers look to tap into their water resources.
“The concern I have is that the policy environment is not really designed to kind of respond to this new, unprecedented demand,” said Chris Manganiello, the water policy director for Chattahoochee Riverkeeper.
He said the state has specific policies to conserve water and prioritize who gets it during droughts, like hospitals and nursing homes. Still, Georgia hasn’t factored data centers into that equation.
“They need to run 24/7, 365,” Manganiello said.
And when it’s really hot, like during a drought, it’s even more important they get water because if the servers get too hot, they fry.
“And so if all of these large data centers come online, and we’re in the middle of a drought, it’s going to put a lot more stress on the natural river system,” Manganielo said.
And, he pointed out, metro Atlanta is near the headwaters of several rivers.
“There are communities downstream that need water for economic development, too,” Manganiello said.
And Georgia’s been embroiled in decades of legal battles, which locals might remember as the Georgia-Florida water wars. Atlanta was accused of using too much water, though Georgia recently won the biggest case.
“The concern I have is that the policy environment is not really designed to kind of respond to this new, unprecedented demand.”
Chris Manganiello, water policy director for Chattahoochee Riverkeeper
Manganiello said data centers matter in this conversation because the scale of their water use is huge. For example, one proposed data center called Project Sail in Coweta County would use a maximum of 9 million gallons of water a day, or one-third of the entire county’s daily water allotment, which comes from the Chattahoochee.
He also said only an estimated 3 million gallons would return to the river — the other 6 million would be evaporated into the atmosphere.
“If you had a pipe that was leaking 60% of its water, you’d fix it because that could just, that would just — this is catastrophic,” Manganiello said.
Manganiello said his organization is compiling the information they can find on proposed data centers in the watershed by using resources like Georgia’s Developments of Regional Impact reports that give some details about potential water usage. But overall, he said there’s no central place to find this data, so organizations like his have to bring a bunch of data together to get a holistic picture of what’s happening up and down the Chattahoochee.
Looking for solutions
Tom Perkins is the Vice President of 365 Data Centers. He said data center companies want to do something about the water usage problem.
“Everyone is looking for opportunities to continue to drive sustainability within the data center footprints,” Perkins said. “But you know, as you use more capacity and you use more power, then you certainly need more ability to continue to cool that.”
And he’s hoping more of those technologies are on the horizon.
Danny Johnson, managing director of the natural resources department at the Atlanta Regional Commission, said his organization is encouraging local governments and utilities to push developers on these technologies.
“That may not be … widespread across the market yet,” Johnson said.
He said right now, there are two main ways data centers keep cool: evaporative cooling and closed-loop cooling. He said both have benefits and drawbacks. Evaporative cooling loses lots of water, while closed-loop systems need far more electricity, a costly resource that data centers also already use a lot of.
Right now, Johnson said ARC and other water professionals are still just trying to get organized on where data centers are and how they’re using water.
“We are working on collecting all of the statistics and the facts that we can about data center growth, how water is required for these facilities, for cooling, and what kind of options there are,” Johnson said.
Since the data center boom has been so fast in metro Atlanta, Johnson said the ARC is focusing on educating local leaders on data centers’ water usage and encouraging them to get water utilities involved in these development conversations early in the process. He said this will help make sure water utilities are considering how data centers are impacting long-term water resources, drought planning and more.
Back in Douglas County, Shearouse said the Douglasville-Douglas County Water & Sewer Authority has actually been doing just that for a long time.
“For about 15, 16 … well, I’ll say 17 or 18 years,” Shearhouse estimated.
He said that’s been with one big customer: Google.
Shearouse said once the county treats wastewater, it puts the clean water back into the environment to continue flowing downstream.
“We developed a separate treatment system at one of our wastewater treatment plants to deliver cooling water specifically for that partner,” Shearouse said.
He calls it “using the best water for their need,” — working smarter, not harder.
This water is cleaned more than what’s going back into the environment, but far less than the high degree of treatment required for drinking water. Shearouse said it makes more sense not to use a lot of water from the reservoir and to avoid treating water to drinking water standards when it won’t be drunk.
This solution hasn’t caught on statewide. Shearhouse said Douglas County hasn’t had any other data centers as big as Google that would need a system like this, and it’s not a system being used commonly around the state.
He said the county is optimistic that in the future, it could expand on this method to accommodate other data centers or other big water users looking to open up shop in Douglas County.
And, Shearouse said they might need to. With the rise of AI, more and bigger data centers are coming — and the demand for water isn’t going away.
This story is part of the WABE Newsroom series Server South: What’s powering Atlanta’s data center growth — and what it means for you.
