00:00When we talk about the cloud, we usually think of something intangible, but a bank transfer,
00:04A digital medical record or an internet platform depends on buildings like this one.
00:08Data centers that operate 24 hours a day and require constant electricity and cooling.
00:13They are growing in the Bogotá savanna.
00:15The question is whether the authorities know what their combined water and energy footprint will be.
00:22Being in the savanna and because of the cold weather in the savanna,
00:26This makes data center cooling convenient so that they have a temperature
00:32which is what is required to prevent, let's say, too much heating within these infrastructures.
00:40So, for that reason, secondly, Colombia has something wonderful and it has had it for 20 years now
00:45And that's because we have free trade zones.
00:49So, most of the data centers that exist in the savanna are in free trade zones.
00:54The climate and tax benefits explain some of the interest in the region.
00:58But before discussing its impacts, we must avoid generalizations.
01:01Not all data centers are the same size or serve the same function.
01:04A corporate center for companies or public entities
01:07It does not have the capacity or the demand for a hyperscale designed to serve
01:11large cloud services or artificial intelligence.
01:13Our data center is designed to handle corporate and government workloads.
01:18Does that mean that the densities, while high, are not so high as to be comparable?
01:24to the consumption that can use or require a hyperscale.
01:28The second difference lies in the cooling.
01:30The services produce heat and that heat must be permanently removed.
01:34Some facilities use air.
01:36Others use liquids that circulate directly near the processors.
01:39As computing power increases, air may no longer be sufficient.
01:43We have air-cooled systems, which is what we use.
01:47And for very high loads, liquid cooling is currently being used.
01:51which is the one that uses water or water with some elements to cool.
01:55At this point, air cooling doesn't apply and we have to look at other methods.
02:00There needs to be a regulation that also adapts to the different data centers.
02:05Because there are data centers that, let's say, are cooled with groundwater,
02:08But there are other data centers that are cooled with water taken from the air.
02:11But we also need to see how it is regulated, because data centers are diverse from one another.
02:22Ilcari claims that he does not use water as the basis of his cooling.
02:25That may be true for this installation, but it needs to be clarified.
02:29Not consuming water directly to cool the servers does not necessarily mean that the total water footprint is zero.
02:34Part of it may be associated with the electricity that keeps the data center running.
02:43To find out what the environmental authority knows, the viewer asks the Regional Autonomous Corporation of Cundinamarca
02:49due to the permits and projected water consumption at these facilities.
02:52The CAR responded that it did not find any water concessions registered specifically for data center activity.
02:57For this reason, it also does not know how much water the identified projects will require.
03:02However, the fact that a facility does not have a direct concession does not mean that it does not consume water.
03:07You can receive it through a utility company and appear simply as a network user.
03:12The entity also acknowledged that it does not have a specific methodology for assessing the combined water and energy footprint
03:18nor the cumulative impacts of this industry.
03:20This does not prove that the companies are in breach of regulations.
03:22This shows that the authority still does not have a complete picture of the sector.
03:26This is where the main gap appears.
03:27An authority can review separately a tree felling, an electrical connection, a water concession or a dumping.
03:33But that doesn't allow us to determine what will happen when several projects share the same network simultaneously.
03:38the electrical networks, the aqueducts, the roads and the savanna soil.
03:41Each installation can have its own permissions.
03:44What has not yet been calculated is their combined footprint.
03:47All data centers will continue to be intensive consumers of energy.
03:53So, as we see here, there are some growth projects planned for two to four years,
03:58We are going to need more energy from our electricity providers.
04:03Therefore, the viewer asked him how much capacity the network has.
04:06What works will be necessary to connect these new loads?
04:09and how demand growth is being calculated.
04:11At the time of this video's completion, the company had not responded.
04:18Regarding the issue of consumption, it is absolutely necessary that those who sell these services have a say.
04:25We're talking about something called PUE, which is how much energy I'm going to spend in a data center.
04:30It's a super technical word, but what it sums up is how much the data center should spend on energy.
04:36And we calculate it in something we call PUE.
04:40The word is in English, but the point, to be clearer, is that it's viable.
04:45In other words, a data center to sell services to whomever it needs to sell them to.
04:49You have to say what your PUE is.
04:51And there it is, saying how much it's spending.
04:53There is another word which is PUE.
04:55And in that, what we do is see how much the data center is spending on water.
05:00Because data center services are calculated in these two processes.
05:05The industry and those who question its expansion agree on one thing.
05:08Consumption must be public.
05:10The discussion is not whether Cundinamarca should give up infrastructure necessary for the digital economy.
05:15It's about whether you can decide how many data centers to receive and where to locate them without first knowing their combined water footprint.
05:21and energy.
05:21And that raises the question: who is measuring the cumulative footprint of data centers across the savanna?
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05:30and visit www.elespectador.com
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