How do data centres use water?

Section 1

Who owns Alberta's water?

Water in Alberta belongs to the Crown, held on behalf of Albertans. No company can own water, no matter how large its investment. A licence grants permission to use a defined amount under defined conditions, and that permission can be scaled back or cut off.

Alberta allocates water by seniority, under a system called First In Time, First In Right. The oldest licences stand first in line. A brand-new data centre licence stands last. If a river runs low, the newest licences are cut first, and the oldest, held mostly by farmers, irrigation districts and towns, are protected.

Households need no licence at all. Ordinary household water use is protected by law and is never curtailed. In an emergency, Alberta's response plan puts human health, the raising of animals and public safety ahead of every industrial user.

And in southern Alberta, the Bow, Oldman and South Saskatchewan basins have been closed to new surface water licences since 2006. That closure came nearly two decades before any data centre proposal. A project there must obtain water from an existing licensee, because there is no new water to give.

Section 2

How data centres cool their computers

Computer chips run hot. Every machine that works hard makes heat: a truck engine needs a radiator, and a building full of servers running around the clock needs the industrial version of one. How a data centre moves its heat out decides how much water it uses, and the difference between designs is enormous.

Older designs use evaporative cooling towers, which lose large volumes of water to the air as steam. That is the version of this industry most people have read about, and the version behind most of the alarming headlines from other places.

The newest AI data centres work differently, because they have to. The latest chips run so hot, packed so densely, that fans and air cooling can no longer do the job. So the industry is moving to sealed liquid cooling. Coolant flows over every chip in a closed loop, like a car radiator: filled once, then recirculated for the life of the facility. The heat leaves the building through large outdoor radiator coils called dry coolers.

How big is the difference? NVIDIA, the world's leading AI chip maker, puts numbers on it. A conventional cooling-tower system consumes roughly 2.6 million gallons of water per megawatt every year. The new sealed design eliminates that: the loop is filled once, then recirculated, so day-to-day cooling consumes no water. NVIDIA puts the reduction at up to 100 per cent in the right climate, with mechanical chillers needed only about 1 per cent of the year in some locations. Alberta is exactly that kind of location, as the next section explains.

Meta's Sturgeon County project is built this way. It is closed-loop and dry-cooled, with no water used for cooling in normal operation. Water at the site is limited to ordinary domestic use, fire protection and equipment maintenance. Meta states the entire campus will use less water in a year than a typical golf course.

Section 3

Alberta's cooler climate is a natural advantage

Sealed liquid cooling needs one thing from the outside world: air that is cooler than the coolant. The newest systems run their coolant at up to 45 degrees Celsius, warmer than a hot tub. The outside air does not need to be cold. It just needs to be cooler than that.

Alberta qualifies every day of the year. Even a hot July afternoon in Alberta can cool these systems without drawing water, and our long winters do the job better than almost anywhere on the continent.

The advantage is bigger than water. Cooling has historically consumed up to 40 per cent of a data centre's electricity. Alberta's air does for free what other places burn power to do. That is one of the reasons companies choose Alberta without being paid to come, and it means the lowest-water designs are also the cheapest ones to run here. In Alberta, the economics and the environment point the same way.

Section 4

What about projects in drier regions?

Some data centres are proposed in southern basins that are closed to new licences, or in regions that have experienced drought. The rules do not bend for them.

A project in a closed basin cannot apply for a new water allocation. It has three options:

The bottom line does not change by region: if the data shows an area cannot support the water requested, the project will not receive a water authorization.

Section 5

The checks continue after approval

Water licences come with teeth. Companies must report how much water they use, and inspectors verify, with priority set by risk, self-reported data and public complaints.

Alberta watches its rivers in real time, through a network of more than 450 monitoring gauges tracking snowpack, river flow and precipitation. In a shortage, curtailment decisions rest on that live data, not on company promises.

And Albertans have standing in the process. Anyone directly affected by a water application can file a statement of concern during the public notice period. Filing one is what preserves your right to appeal the decision to the Environmental Appeals Board, an independent body.