The water level of the Great Lakes is decreasing rapidly: Are AI data centers to blame?

Containing roughly 20% of the freshwater on the planet, the Great Lakes are one of the largest deposits of this valuable resource. But in recent years the level of the lakes has been decreasing and dropped below the long-term average quickly last fall.

So, it is unsettling for communities along the shores of the Great Lakes that firms are planning to build water-thirsty data centers, which are the backbone of artificial intelligence technology, in their backyards. Residents have been speaking out, trying to stop the projects from going forward. But are the data centers really to blame for the dropping water levels of the Great Lakes?

The reason water levels are declining in the Great Lakes

The water level in the Great Lakes rises and falls throughout the year with the lowest levels experienced in the winter and the highest levels reached by late spring. This is the result of evaporation as the weather cools down in autumn and early winter as the water is warmer than the surrounding air which usually results in lake effect snowfalls on the downwind side of the lakes. Then in the spring, snowmelt and precipitation top the levels up once again.

Concerns were raised late last year that the levels were dropping below long-term averages by as much a four feet in Lake Erie for example. Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay Waterkeeper Heather Smith noted back in November that while Lake Michigan and Lake Huron hadn’t hit their lowest lows on record, she told UpNorthLive that the speed of the decline was not normal and unsettling.

“What researchers and practitioners are understanding is that climate change is having an impact on water levels. We’re switching between the highs and lows quicker, and we’re expected to have higher highs and lower lows in face of a changing climate,” Smith pointed out.

She explained that there was a steep drop in water levels in September, which is out of the ordinary, but put it down to evaporation and a lack of precipitation. “I think it’s more evident to folks that water levels are dropping because it’s happening really rapidly,” she added.

As of July 10, all of the Great Lakes except Superior were above the long-term average for this time of year according to the Amry Corp of Engineers weekly update. NOAA provides a Lake Level Viewer that the public can use to check water levels at the numerous monitoring stations along the shores of the Great Lakes.

Data centers impact on water levels not so clearcut

Data centers use vast amounts of electricity and water to operate. Water is used to cool the plethora of processors in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of servers they house. Either the water is circulated through them to keep the processors at the right temperature, or when electricity is produced.

Some data centers use closed loop systems to reduce their water needs, others simply transfer the water with the extracted heat to cooling towers, where some of it evaporates and then the remainder is put into wastewater systems.

The less water a data center uses to cool its processors, the more electricity it will need for cooling systems. Depending on the source of that electricity, renewable or non-renewable, determines how much of a carbon footprint the data center has.

In a newsletter, Wired’s Molly Taft explained that the experts she spoke to said “[data centers’] overall consumption, in many places, is less of a risk than the public may think.” But they also “caution against dismissing concerns about water outright.”

“In the near term, it’s not a concern and it’s not a nationwide crisis. But it depends on location. In locations that have existing water stress, building these AI data centers is gonna be a big problem,” Fengqi You, a professor in energy systems engineering at Cornell, told Taft.

As for draining the Great Lakes, Melissa K. Scanlan, Director of Center for Water Policy at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences, shared that “the Great Lakes are massive, so we don’t think that the threat is really of draining them.”

“But the cumulative impacts of all of these straws being put into the lakes for the data centers and for the electric utilities, adds up,” she noted. “So we should understand how much water that is.”

Scanlan explained that “less than one percent of the Great Lakes’ [water supply] is renewed annually through precipitation. So, the rest of it is basically fossil water.” This means that it’s necessary to “work within that budget.” She called for the creation of “a regional regulatory entity, that is looking at a water budget and assessing the cumulative draws on the lakes.”

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