Growing pressure from communities and institutional investors is forcing data center developers to disclose site-level water and power usage, driving a shift toward tailored, integrated cooling technologies.

Read here about how operators are moving away from single-metric evaluations to balance the inherent conflict between Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE). For years, PUE was the primary metric used to judge data center efficiency. To achieve an excellent, low PUE, many operators leaned heavily on evaporative cooling. Evaporative cooling uses the natural evaporation of water to cool the air, which drastically slashes the electrical power needed to run mechanical chillers. However, this comes at the cost of massive water consumption, causing the facility’s WUE to skyrocket. Conversely, to operate sustainably in water-stressed regions, data centers utilize air cooling (or dry mechanical cooling) – achieving near-zero WUE, but with the trade-off that compressor-based air systems require much more electricity. That inherently degrades (increases) the PUE. 

To address this, facilities are adopting region-specific strategies—such as using evaporative cooling only in water-abundant areas and implementing closed-loop, dry-hybrid, or direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems in drought-prone regions to drastically cut local resource consumption.

Rather than wait for facilities to make changes, some municipalities and regional governments are moving toward zoning or mandates for near-zero water cooling. I highlight some of the more recent changes in today’s RCRTech story.