Thirsty Servers, Silent Reservoirs: Can Geothermal Power the Water-Smart Data Center Era? By: Robert Buluma The digital economy runs on an invisible infrastructure—rows of servers humming inside vast data centers, processing everything from financial transactions to artificial intelligence models. But beneath this digital revolution lies a growing, often overlooked tension: water . Recent projections warn that data centers could consume as much freshwater as tens of millions of people by 2030 . Whether the exact figure is 30, 40, or 46 million, the signal is unmistakable: the world’s data infrastructure is becoming a major water consumer . At the same time, a quieter force is emerging from beneath the Earth’s surface— geothermal energy —with the potential not only to power data centers, but to fundamentally reshape their water footprint . This is not just a story about energy. It is a story about resource convergence —where water, heat, electricity, and digital demand collide—and ho...
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