Scope 1 (on-site) water consumption
- Cooling towers: depending on the weather conditions and operational settings, data centers can evaporate about 1 – 9 liters per kWh of server energy (about 1 L/kWh for Google’s annualized global number and 9 L/kWh for a large commercial data center during the summer in Arizona.
- Outside air cooling with water assistance: Water consumption of 0.2 L/kWh averaged over Meta’s global data centers. Note that when the outside air temperature is high, outside air cooling evaporates a significant amount of water, thus resulting in a low average but high peak water withdrawal.