Toilet Water Cools Data Center

By Matthew Dublin

In order to meet the water consumption needs of its evaporative cooling system, a Google data center located in Douglas County, Georgia is now syphoning off waste water from a local sewage treatment plant. While the water isn't potable, it is clean enough to be used to cool down a data center.

It's a good, and rare, example of HPC interfacing with the local community in mutually beneficial way. The Georgia Water and Sewer Authority (WSA) ends up saving money on their operations as Google uses up to 30 percent of the waste water headed to the WSA's treatment plant, and Google now has a cheap source of cooling without having to build a lot of infrastructure to deliver the water to their data center.