By Julia Robin
In southern New Mexico, water is a precious resource that touches everything. It touches families and businesses. It touches agriculture and the food we eat. It touches public health and safety. And, ultimately, it touches the region’s long-term future.
We take our responsibility to preserve water very seriously, so we want to help clarify and correct the record about Project Jupiter’s water use. We updated the project’s power design last month and want to give residents of Doña Ana County the most up-to-date and accurate information about our current plans and expectations for the campus’ water use.
The project will not use the community’s public drinking water to cool the data center or run the fuel cell power solution. Like any other business, we will have many employees working on site, and they will of course need access to drinkable water. To be clear – drinking water will only be used for office purposes and will be on par with a typical office building, just like other employers.
Let’s talk about where this water is coming from. We’re treating non-potable well water from an existing New Mexico rights holder to both cool the data center and to operate the fuel cells.
This well water will be used for the initial fill of both systems and for the low volume of ongoing water to maintain them. Water from the well is unsuitable for drinking or municipal uses. Oracle and our partners are able to repurpose this water for our data center without adding any strain on community resources.
Second, our data center uses a closed-loop cooling system that recycles water without needing replenishment. Investing in closed-loop cooling isn’t something all data center operators choose, but it’s the right choice for New Mexico and for all of Oracle’s large artificial intelligence data center campuses.
Other data centers that use evaporative cooling require millions of gallons of water a day. In the closed-loop system used at Project Jupiter, the system requires a one-time fill of approximately 2.5 million gallons of non-potable water for each of the four data center buildings, over a period of two to three years.
The cooling liquid stays within sealed pipes and is repeatedly reused. Day-to-day cooling does not require any added water, and maintenance top-offs are minimal — approximately 1,000 gallons or less annually. Over a 15-year period, the one-time fill and annual maintenance equates to the water usage of approximately six U.S. households.
Project Jupiter’s updated power plan will use fuel cell technology from Bloom Energy, which represents a meaningful change to the project’s water usage.
To support the system’s initial startup, a one-time fill of approximately 960,000 gallons of water is required. The fuel cells generate electricity through a non-combustion process and require no water during normal operations.
Water needs for long-term maintenance of the fuel cell system are expected to total approximately 167,000 gallons per year, less than the annual water used by two U.S. households. On average over 15 years, the one-time fill and ongoing maintenance equates to the water usage of approximately three U.S. households per year.
It’s a negligible amount of water, especially in the context of the massive economic benefits the project will create for the county and the state – and without using any drinking water beyond standard office use.
All in all, between initial fill and ongoing operations for both the data center and fuel cell system, we will use approximately 11 million gallons of nonpotable water for initial fill and about 168,000 gallons per year for maintenance.
Over 15 years, this all averages to the annual use of about nine U.S. households. By comparison, a typical golf course in desert climates requires anywhere from 120 million to 200 million gallons or more of water a year – or about 1,826 U.S. households a year.
By my math, 1,826 homes is a whole lot more than nine.
Project Jupiter will power AI, which is our best hope for optimizing water consumption across the planet. At home, AI tools can provide easy, xeriscaped landscaping plans to minimize day-to-day water use. In agriculture, AI algorithms can analyze real-time soil moisture, weather forecasts, and even anticipate rainfall to pause scheduled irrigation and deliver the exact amount of water needed for any given crop.
In municipal infrastructure, AI can analyze data on soil composition, weather, and historical pipe failures to calculate the likelihood of pipe bursts. In the data center world I work in, AI can monitor water use in real-time to detect leaks or anomalies to ensure technicians address the issue immediately.
So does the project use water? Yes. Are we doing it responsibly and protecting New Mexico’s drinking water at all costs – 100% yes! This is responsible water use that comes with tremendous economic benefits for New Mexicans.
New Mexico will house the greatest technological advancement the world has ever known. And that advancement will ultimately help reduce water consumption across New Mexico and the globe, in ways we would have never been able to before.
Learn more at ProjectJupiterTogether.com.
Julia Robin is head of infrastructure planning and sourcing for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
The post Opinion: Oracle says Project Jupiter will protect New Mexico drinking water while fueling AI growth appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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