Millions of gallons of water needed for new data centres in Chile during 30 year drought

Millions of gallons of water needed for new data centres in Chile during 30 year drought
Chile looks set to become the data centre capital of Latin America, with the country’s President announcing another 28 proposed developments.  But these data centres require vast amounts of electricity to run and huge volumes of water to cool them. With the country experiencing a severe long term drought, predicted to last until 2040, how can building these centres benefit the environment and local communities.  Rest of World Latin American reporter Daniela Dib has been investigating these concerns.

Concrete alternatives not very eco-friendly
New biobased building materials made from fungi and agricultural residues have been hailed as a possible environmentally friendly concrete replacement.  However, new research suggests that these alternatives need huge amounts of electricity to produce and have a shorter lifespan than concrete.  To discuss these potential issues as well as how to overcome them, the researcher behind the findings, Stefania Akromah of the University of Bristol joins us on the show.   

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Peter Guest.    

More on this week's stories:
U.S tech giants are building dozens of data centers in Chile. Locals are fighting back
Potential Environmental Impact of Mycelium Composites on African Communities 

Chapters

• 2:19 New data Centres in Chile
• 14:48 Building material made from fungi not a great green option

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello, this is Gareth. Welcome along to the Somewhere on Earth podcast for Tuesday the 4th of June 2024. I'm here in our wonderful studio here in London. We have guests from various places. Don't mean to sound vague there, but you'll get the hang of it as we get into the show. 

00:00:23 Gareth Mitchell 

And with us today for some experting, is journalist Pete Guest, how are you Pete? 

00:00:26 Peter Guest 

I’m very well Gareth. How are you? 

00:00:28 Gareth Mitchell 

Very well. Thanks. Not seen you for a few weeks, but you look on fine form as ever. Just to jump in before we get into the content. A lovely message here from Patricia, who has linked to an Economist article. This is on our Facebook group. 

00:00:42 Gareth Mitchell 

An Economist article talking about podcasting and how the medium has turned 20 years old, apparently, which I guess is down to how you define the beginning of podcasting. I'm not gonna get too hung up on that, but let's just take it for granted that podcasting is now 20 years old. And Patricia says podcasting is in the ascendance. I think this is good news for Somewhere on Earth. 

00:01:00 Gareth Mitchell 

I'm happy for podcasting to be all about the audio, even though apparently video is the way it's at. But Patricia says I'm happy for it all to be about the audio, so it can be listened to in the car and on the go. And I know pedants will be saying, yeah, you can watch video on the go, but I think the point being, not necessarily if you're driving or using heavy machinery. 

00:01:19 Peter Guest 

Exactly, I was going to say please don't watch video. 

00:01:21 Gareth Mitchell 

Please do not do that. But Patricia goes on to say producer Ania Lichtarowicz is multi- talented on both sides of the glass. She makes an excellent presenter’s friend. Well, good news for you, Patricia. We're going to hear from Ania on this side of the glass in our next edition. There we are. That goes out to you. Patricia. Thank you for that. Let's get going. 

00:01:44 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up today. 

00:01:48 Gareth Mitchell 

US tech companies are enthusiastically locating data centres in Chile, but environmental campaigners are concerned. We'll be finding out why and what, if anything, the tech companies have been saying about the issue.  And in Africa, a bio alternative to concrete is throwing up fresh questions about the water, land and especially energy related costs of producing it. That's all right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:02:20 Gareth Mitchell 

Chile is enthusiastically opening itself up to the data centre market. 16 data centres have been approved over the last 12 years, 28 have just been announced, but there is a slight technical problem here. The centres use millions of litres of water and Chile is in the midst of a drought.  Santiago and its surrounding metropolitan area is now a major data centre 

00:02:44 Gareth Mitchell 

Hub.  The government says it's stepping in to regulate the industry, but the concerns still remain. Daniela Dib is Latin America reporter for the excellent Rest of World Publication and has just co-authored an investigation to all this. She joins us now. Hello, Daniela. Welcome to the podcast. 

00:03:01 Daniela Dib 

Hello everyone. Thank you so much for the invitation. 

00:03:04 Gareth Mitchell 

Lovely. So can you just set out what the problem is here? You know the extent of the problem. You know, just how much data centre development have we been seeing in Chile and how much are we set to? 

00:03:16 Daniela Dib 

For sure. So we found a a really interesting government policy announced by the beginning, sorry, by the end of May in which President Boric announced that to the 22 existing data centers in the country, they would expect to bring in 28 more. 

00:03:37 Daniela Dib 

And that is remarkable given that Chile has 19 million people and 7 million of them live in the Santiago metropolitan area. 

00:03:47 Daniela Dib 

And it's definitely a really high data center concentration per population in Latin America. Brazil is also a big data center hub, but Chile is remarkable in this sense and it's even more interesting that they are all in the capital city and this is something that has been happening for the past 12 years because an area in Santiago's metro region has been legally sort of like determined for industrial 

00:04:16 Daniela Dib 

exploitation for years. It's an area that has a lot of beer factories, it has other types of really big, like high water consuming industries there. And on top of that, data centers are being added to the region. So the the Chilean government has been very, very pressing on on the fact that they want data  

00:04:37 Daniela Dib 

centers to come into the country because it wants to to sort of like gear Chile as being a a technological hub around specifically in Latin America, but 

00:04:48 Daniela Dib 

around the world too. And it was just striking for Claudia Urquieta and I - she's my co-reporter, she's based in Santiago - to see that there has been a lot of pushback from local activists, especially because there is a drought in Chile. Since 2010 the rainfall sort of levels have been reducing and it's been expected  

00:05:09 Daniela Dib 

to it is expected to last until 2040. So they are they are concerned about such big high water consumption. 

00:05:16 Gareth Mitchell 

So sure, just so a major drought then, especially extrapolating out to 2040 and not really expecting a whole lot of improvement in the situation. So clearly a concern over water consumption. But can we sort of quantify that a little bit in terms of the amount of water that we're talking about or maybe the the amount of water that Chile frankly lacks to service these data centers. 

00:05:39 Daniela Dib 

Yeah. So it it was, it was brought to to our attention by the activists that there are wetlands in some of the the the areas in Santiago that have been under hydric stress, which means that due to the drought they are not being able to sustain local fauna that they are 

00:05:59 Daniela Dib 

there's like a lot of of efforts of trying to sustain them or or or even keep them safe. And given that there are 16 data centers in the area and on average each data center consumes 25,000,000 litres, it's it's definitely a problem and. 

00:06:16 Gareth Mitchell 

Yes, so you say 25,000,000 litres, is that per year or per day or? 

00:06:21 Daniela Dib 

Per year. Sorry. Yeah, a small data center that uses 1 megawatt of power. But on average, like mostly the larger data centers have to use 100 megawatts per year. So that's like 100 times the amount of water that they need. 

00:06:40 Daniela Dib 

And we did focus on US tech companies, although they are not the only ones that are putting data centers in the region, but we chose this because they have the largest pushback and they are also the highest water consuming. Their Google data center in, in the commune of Quilicura, which was the first one there, it got water usage permits that allow them to extract 1 billion litres per year, or 50 litres 

00:07:07 Daniela Dib 

per second, which is massive on paper, that's what they say. They can extract them from the local wetlands. 

00:07:14 Gareth Mitchell 

So what does this mean for residents? Are people in Chile being told to cut down on their water perhaps, while their data centres are so busy slurping up all this this water? 

00:07:26 Daniela Dib 

So this this is something very interesting that the activists told us. We talked to about a dozen people, most of them activists, and they mentioned that it was very hard to campaign against these big tech companies precisely because they haven't, 

00:07:41 Daniela Dib 

they haven't implied that people would get water cooked and and the data centers are not that visible. They just look like very, very large buildings. But no one really knows, if if you if you're not a data center sort of savvy person, you don't know how they look like. So they did mention something 

00:08:01 Daniela Dib 

that I thought was one of the reasons why maybe big tech companies go there, that in Chile's water rights are private. So the the the government has assigned water rights 

00:08:12 Daniela Dib 

to private people or companies for decades, like for for a while. And these are the ones who who are in charge of like distributing the water so it doesn't affect the public water supply. But it does affect the the wetlands and the fact that there's a there are whole ecosystems under there who depend on them. And that was what worried them. 

00:08:33 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. Now, Peter, you've seen a a fair few data centres in your time in crypto mining operations and I guess they don't have a big sign on top saying data centre in big neon letters. So they're fairly anonymous buildings, aren't they? But what are you making of what you're hearing, you know, this, this incredible water consumption, which I suppose I should add by the way is is for cooling, isn't it in case people are wondering what all the water is being used for? So it's cooling of all the the processing cores and the data center. But what are you hearing here? 

00:08:58 Peter Guest 

Sure. I mean we talked about this on the podcast a few times around crypto as well as AI. And you know, we're sort of mildly obsessed by this idea of the physical and human geography of these technologies that we 

00:09:08 Peter Guest 

as consumers just experience as being digital and and you know we, we used this idea that software just sort of scales endlessly, right. It's a very light business. It's not like a manufacturing where you 

0:09:19 Peter Guest 

have to create new factories to make new things, and that's like part of their narrative, right? The idea that there’s limitless growth, limitless upside. But as we see, AI  

00:09:28 Peter Guest 

being rolled out, that you’re starting to see how limited that actually is and as it gets integrated into so many parts of the Internet, the hardware demands just grow and grow and grow and grow, and they have to add huge amounts of physical infrastructure, physical spaces, power and water. And I know that's not new. We've had this conversation before in other businesses, but it's something the industry has to reckon with like the,  

00:09:48 Peter Guest 

they'll say, you know, the demand for power and water we’ll get it fixed. We going to get better software, better chips, develop new algorithms, but there's already at this point where we're already at this point where the demand is crossing with the supply and you have to answer these these ethical, physical human questions. 

00:10:03 Peter Guest 

Like should we ever be in a position where AI is automatically out competing homes and farms and environment wetlands. And so on for water or electricity just because it's got more capital behind it, it can pay for it and somebody else can't. 

00:10:16 Gareth Mitchell 

I suppose you know it's all very well apportioning blame and so on, but is it kind of down to us as users? Because we all, I know I do, I benefit from these cloud services. I have cloud storage myself. 

00:10:30 Gareth Mitchell 

This very script I'm looking at here is sitting you know, it's a shared script that is probably definitely sitting in some data center somewhere, doing its own little bit to increase energy usage and water consumption.   

00:10:46 Gareth Mitchell 

Or is it kind of simplistic to blame consumers because this is the technology environment that we've been, we've been built up and I don't have much choice. If I want to share a script with somebody, short of actually sending around a piece of paper, if I want to do it on a computer, it's kind of going to have to end up in the cloud anyway. I don't know, it's a tricky one. 

00:11:03 Peter Guest 

Well, I. Yes, I I think blaming consumers is a little bit of a get out at times. I think we do need to start talking about how much value AI unlocks in economies, right. 

00:11:14 Peter Guest 

We we assume that it's going to be great. They talk about trillions of dollars of opportunity. It's going to make jobs more efficient. Healthcare is gonna be better and so on and and so a lot of that might well be real. But you have to look at how the value gets distributed in society, right? And the physical infrastructure is a really good way at measuring that and looking at that. So I'm thinking about the UK, right. We talked about this as a kind of a  

00:11:35 Peter Guest 

Chile problem, but this is a global problem. And look at where a lot of data centers are clustering here in the UK, they're in post industrial places where there's loads of power, loads of excess infrastructure like South Wales, where factories closed, steel works closed, thousands of people lost their jobs. 

00:11:51 Peter Guest 

Is the data center going to come back and create the same number of jobs? Well, no. And are the people who are living there going to get the equivalent value out of the AI, or is that value going to flow to somebody else? You know, we we often think about kind of extractive industries as being relatively kind of colonial in their in their, in their shape. There's a little of that being replaced here as well. So yes we have a responsibility, but is it our fault? I'm not sure. 

00:12:15 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And the activists, Daniela in in Chile, they're talking about this as being extractivism, isn't it? That's a a term that has been coined here. 

00:12:26 Daniela Dib 

Yes and yes, and adding a little bit to what you were you, you and and and Pete were mentioning before, I think it it it the the the type of activists that were engaged or are still engaged in push the pushback against data centers in Chile they are very, very well  

00:12:27 Gareth Mitchell 

Now I see it in your article. 

00:12:46 Daniela Dib 

versed in the in how the entire data center industry works, and that was, I think, exemplary of the Chilean Social and Civic Organization and the fact that they are also 

00:12:58 Daniela Dib 

being in conversations with researchers who are also investigating about this problem around the World. Marina Otero Verzier she's a Spanish researcher who works at Columbia, and she works also with the activists in Chile to try to sort of negotiate with the country. And she also 

00:13:19 Daniela Dib 

told me that this is happening in Spain. That there there is a cluster of data centers being brought up in that country and the local activists are are are the ones that I talked to, 

00:13:29 Daniela Dib 

were were really stressed on the fact, that you just mentioned, right, like data centers are big physical infrastructure that don't necessarily produce or need a lot of employment and they just extract natural resources because it's not only the water, the water is the the biggest concern. 

00:13:50 Daniela Dib 

But it also implies particle pollution, which is the the the pollution that goes up in the air. 

00:13:55 Daniela Dib 

And obviously like energy consumption and such. So they are very, very aware there. There are a handful of people, but they're very much aware of what this industry takes away from them. And one of them told me something really telling, she said they, they they were tired that Chile was sort of like the backyard 

00:14:15 Daniela Dib 

of the world in terms of extractivism. I think adding up to all of the other industries, that or the other materials that are extracted in the country, lithium, etc. 

00:14:25 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, look, Daniele, let's leave it set for now for this part of the podcast, as subscribers can hear a bit more from you just after the main part of the podcast. And as I said in the introduction, for its part, the government in Chile says it's looking into regulation, but I don't see any great evidence that the there are huge regulatory steps being taken. And I think, Daniele, you're you're nodding there as well. All right, now let's continue talking about environmental consequences now. 

00:14:51 Gareth Mitchell 

This is to do with bio-based building materials made from fungi and agricultural residues, and these are known as mycelium composites, and they're an environmentally friendly alternative to concrete. 

00:15:05 Gareth Mitchell 

Except maybe they're not. Producing these biomaterials uses a whole lot of electricity. However, a study also says that these harms can be alleviated by bringing in alternative energy sources, bringing those into production. Well, let's hear more from the lead author of a study that's just been looking at these environmental aspects. Stefania Akromah joins us from the University of Bristol in the south west of England. Nice to be with you, Stephanie. Thanks for being on the podcast. 

00:15:35 Stefania Akromah 

Hi, nice to be with you and thank you for the opportunity so we can talk about my work on your platform. 

00:15:38 Gareth Mitchell 

Thanks for being here. 

00:15:41 Gareth Mitchell 

Let's get into it. So mycelium composites for building and construction. So that's the full name. They're abbreviated to MCBs, aren't they? So. So what's this fungi. Is it? And it's related biomaterials that can be somehow made into building materials. 

00:15:58 Stefania Akromah 

Yeah. So as you said in the introduction, mycelium composites are basically bio-based materials made from agricultural waste and mycelium, which is the roots of mushrooms. Mycelium composites have gained a lot of interest because of their numerous numerous advantages, which include the fact that they are bio based. They are made using an energy efficient manufacturing process. 

00:16:25 Stefania Akromah 

And at the end of life they can be biodegraded or composted into useful products like fertilizers and things like that, which reduces the impact on the environment. 

00:16:40 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And so they can be fashioned into effectively building blocks, can they or they? Yeah, so you know, so they can, pre-existing blocks that could be used for buildings or any kind of construction. 

00:16:52 Stefania Akromah 

Yes. So because of how the mycelium composites are made, they can be pretty much molded into any shape you want. 

00:17:01 Stefania Akromah 

So the way a mycelium composite is made is that, so fungi or mushrooms grow by feeding onto organic matter and as they feed on it they grow biomass. So if you place this organic matter into a mode of your desired shape, say a block to make a brick, then you can actually obtain this final composite in that same shape. 

00:17:31 Gareth Mitchell 

So really so far it sounds almost too good to be true. You know, these are biomaterials, they have many of the properties that makes concrete attractive but don't have well, at least we didn't think they had, as greater environmental impact as concrete. Yeah, we're about to hear from you in your research about the those impacts. 

00:17:52 Gareth Mitchell 

Can we just scope this out a little bit about where you've been investigating this because there seems to be in an African context?  You’ve compared the situation across seven countries in Africa, including Mozambique, DRC, Ethiopia, Zambia, Kenya. Those are a few that I counted in your paper and you're taking Ghana as a baseline. So why are you looking specifically at the continent of Africa? 

00:18:15 Stefania Akromah 

So some of us are familiar with the Sustainable Development Goals as set by the United Nation, which are aimed to like end poverty, inequality, protect the planet and all of that good stuff. 

00:18:27 Stefania Akromah 

Uh. The main aim for setting these goals is to ensure that no country is left behind. But unfortunately developing countries are falling behind because they are constrained by limited financial resources. So because mycelium composites are basically made out of waste 

00:18:47 Stefania Akromah 

materials from the agriculture and our industrial sectors, they are considered cost effective solution. And also the simple manufacturing process that does not require significant and expensive 

00:19:03 Stefania Akromah 

equipment makes it also cost effective. So I proposed mycelium composites for the many benefits it can have for the African country, for the African continent, which include providing alternative renewable materials to the construction industry, for example. But it can also serve as a waste management approach to agricultural waste, which many of these countries is abandoned in the open field or incinerated for the lack of efficient systems to get rid of this waste. 

00:19:37 Stefania Akromah 

Also, this technology, as I explained in my previous review paper, can also offer financial benefits to many African countries, as well as other developing countries, which include generating revenue for smallholder farmers which can sell some of these agricultural waste and residues. 

00:19:58 Stefania Akromah 

Also, startups engaging in mycelium composites manufacturing can generate employment opportunity for the youth and other amazing advantages of this technology. 

00:20:09 Gareth Mitchell 

All right. Well, let's get into the downsides, many of which you're looking into in this study. And you looked at, for instance, things like to travel distance. So can you source this stuff locally or does it kind of rack up carbon miles as it were, in transport? You know, what about the water use, back on water again, the the use of land. And but you honed in  especially on electricity use. So just begin by telling me how electricity is used in this process and then what you found in terms of its impact. 

00:20:39 Stefania Akromah 

Alright, so in order to understand how much electricity is used, I have to quickly go through the manufacturing process for mycelium composite. So in simple words, you have to obtain this organic biomass from the site where it's generated. So from a local farm or from an agri-industrial processing site. 

00:20:58 Stefania Akromah 

Then you would transport this material to the mycelium composite manufacturing site. Now, because fungi require a very sterile environment and grow growing medium, every material and every tool that's used to produce a mycelium composite needs to be sterilized. And the sterilization or cares in autoclaves or sterilizers that run by electricity. 

00:21:24 Stefania Akromah 

So once everything is sterilized, we can add the fungal mass to the organic material and then we pour it into the molds. Once it's molded the mold also, the the material now needs to be incubated, so you would use incubators which also run by electricity. And the incubation process can last anywhere from 4 weeks to two or three months, so which means you'd be actually using electricity for that long of a period. 

00:21:54 Stefania Akromah 

And once the mycelium composite is fully grown, you remove it from the mold and then you need to dry them in order to kill the fungus. And this also takes about 48 hours in an oven, which is typically powered by electricity. So from this basic explanation I've given, you can see how electricity is a huge part in the manufacturing process for mycelium composite. 

00:22:21 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, OK. No, sure, I really get that kind of energy and intensity there. Pete Guest, then what do you think about all this? 

00:22:28 Peter Guest 

It's interesting. It's staying on the theme of the physical limits of technology and you know, and as a kind of caveat, I love the idea of new materials and, you know, less carbon intensive forms of construction or any of the industries. You know, we see these 

00:22:41 Peter Guest 

industries that bump up against planetary boundaries, so farming. We saw vertical farming, alternative meats, seaweed, plastics in the materials, and they all seem to have enormous potential. It's great that people are investing in exploring them. 

00:22:54 Peter Guest 

But there's always that alluring idea that there's going to be an easy technological fix for a complicated problem, right? That we're going to come up with that, too good to be true, and as you put it, kind of hack cheat code. 

00:23:04 Peter Guest 

And I think what this research shows is that it's really valuable for us to think very critically about that techno fix and be very rational, understand the impact, you know, all the way through the chain. 

00:23:16 Gareth Mitchell 

And this is why this kind of research really helps and really matters. And I suppose an obvious follow-up question from that is the role that renewables could play in this. And yet one point that you make in your paper is 

00:23:29 Gareth Mitchell 

that, that, these are countries that don't really have at the moment that much of a renewable energy infrastructure. So a lot of this energy is coming from fossil fuels. That's that. That is one of the problems that, that you're highlighting here, isn't it? 

00:23:46 Stefania Akromah 

Yes. So as we know, there's many countries in Africa and each of these countries has a different energy mix. So we have countries like South Africa that use about 80% energy coming from coal, which is a fossil fuel resource. And then we have countries like Ethiopia and Kenya that use a lot of renewable energy, such as hydropower. 

00:24:11 Stefania Akromah 

So the work shows that in a country that uses a lot of fossil fuel energy like South Africa, the mycelium composite technology actually becomes very damaging to the environment and its environmental potential even exceeds the 

00:24:31 Stefania Akromah 

environmental damage that concrete materials could cause. On the other hand, in Kenya or Ethiopia, these environmental impacts is reduced drastically by up to 80%, simply because we have renewable energy sources being used there. 

00:24:51 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, OK. So finally, then what are you saying the outcome to this paper? Presumably not  well we've gotta stop using these composites. Is the message more like, you know, we just have to get more real about the the energy costs that lean as much into renewables, as we can, what kind of conclusions might you have here? 

00:25:10 Stefania Akromah 

So the conclusion is as much as we like to preach that bio based materials are renewable and sustainable, it's not right to just assume that they are and studies need to be conducted to assess what the actual footprint of these materials are. It was interesting to find out that even a technology that's generally considered sustainable can sometimes have a greater environmental impact as compared to concrete, for example, as outlined in the study. So this shows that a life cycle assessment actually plays a very crucial 

00:25:48 Stefania Akromah 

role in preemptively addressing the potential damage that technology could cause to the environment, so that then these challenges could be addressed to mitigate the damage they would cause to the environment. 

00:26:03 Gareth Mitchell 

Alright. And there we'll leave it. Thank you very much indeed. That's Stefania Akromah of the University of Bristol. And that will do us for today other than to remind you that our e-mail address is hello@somewhereonearth.co.  That's hello@somewhereonearth.co 

00:26:19 Gareth Mitchell 

And on WhatsApp, we are international code 447486329484, so that's code 447486329484. Go on, program that into your phone right now and just stay in touch with us via WhatsApp. We're on the socials as well and we're pretty easy to find and I'm sure you found us already over there. 

00:26:39 Gareth Mitchell 

So the audio this week has been by Dylan Burton, broadcast content from Lanson's Team Farner, which is where we are right now. Our production manager is Liz Tuohy. The editor is Ania Lichtarowicz. I'm Gareth, and we've heard from Pete today as well. Thank you very much, Peter. 

00:26:54 

Thank you Gareth. 

00:26:54 Gareth Mitchell 

Absolutely marvellous. We'll see you next time, folks. Take care. Bye.