“What the companies are doing is an effort for the development of renewable energies, which do not require so much water and resolve the energy issue; but it is also opting to develop smaller data centers that demand new resources”, explains Gabriel Navarro, general director of Neutral Network, a company that develops neutral fiber optic infrastructure that is used by some data centers and companies.
Queretaro is the hub of data centers at the regional level, but given the accelerated growth of this type of facility, in addition to the housing boom and the development of industrial buildings, it affects the supply of energy and water.
Companies that have large data centers in the state, such as Kio Networks, Telmex, Huawei, Panduit and Megacable, among others, are now looking for options to avoid compromising the operation of their data centers, while seeking to have more sustainable operations. Changing them to colder cities or using renewable energy are considered as alternatives.
a global problem
International data centers face the same challenges as Mexico. According to the study by the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies (IEEE), Energy and water consumption in data centers: sustainability risksome of the solutions that are being studied internationally are the replacement of traditional water evaporative cooling systems with closed circuit ones, that is, using recycled water instead of fresh water.
“It is necessary to develop technology that allows data centers to be more sustainable from the water and energy point of view. Otherwise, the digital world, which we can no longer give up, will come into conflict over the use of natural resources as vital as water and necessary as energy”, the IEEE points out in the study.
Migrate to other cities?
Moving data centers is another option being studied by companies like Google and Facebook, which plan to build data centers in colder places like Finland and Sweden.
In Mexico, San Luis Potosí and Monterrey are locations that are being analyzed as alternatives to Querétaro, where nine data centers were inaugurated this year.
“Querétaro is becoming saturated and companies are beginning to see in which other areas and cities of the country they could create a new cluster. Mexico will eventually become a hub of the data centers that serve Central America”, he explains.
According to the consultancy Aritzon, it is estimated that the data center market in Mexico will have investments of 905 million dollars between now and 2026. This year 15 new projects of this type were approved in Mexico, but the companies have not yet defined the where they will be installed.