Worries over water as a giant data center moves into the New Mexico desert
The building site for the Project Jupiter data center in Doรฑa Ana County, New Mexico STACK Infrastructure/Oracle hide caption SANTA TERESA, N.M. - One of the largest data centers in the country is rising from the parched scrub desert of southern New Mexico. Most county officials
The building site for the Project Jupiter data center in Doรฑa Ana County, New Mexico STACK Infrastructure/Oracle hide caption
SANTA TERESA, N.M. - One of the largest data centers in the country is rising from the parched scrub desert of southern New Mexico. Most county officials are agog at the jobs and investment this high tech mega-project has promised to bring. But many locals are asking: can chile and pecan farming co-exist with Project Jupiter ?
At 1,400 acres, it could swallow New York's Central Park. With two-and-a-half gigawatts of electricity, it could power more than half of New Mexico. And $165 billion in investment capitalโif developers reach that goalโcould pick up the tab for 40 Artemis moon shots.
Yes, these clever comparisons were suggested by artificial intelligenceโwhich is powered by data centers like Project Jupiter. But as they might say down in Donฬa Ana County: you can't water pecans with data.
"I have a little plot of land out here, grow some pecans," says Eddie Estrada, a weekend farmer who works at the state capital. "I had 28 trees, but due to the water shortage many of them died."
Today, the lower Rio Grande is a river of sand most of the year. Blame a searing drought, low snowpack, and climate change. Estrada's water deliveries from the river have dried up, and he has to keep drilling his well deeper as the water table drops. Project Jupiter is six miles from his property near the New Mexico - Texas border. And he's well aware that data centers typically require large volumes of water to cool their server farms that run 24/7.
"Being that we're in a drought, and then to allow a project like this to use that much water," Estrada says, "the fear is that we're going to run out, not only for us that live here but the farmers."
Project Jupiter's tenants will be global tech giants Oracle and OpenAI. What sets Jupiter apart from most of the 3,000 new data centers being planned or built in the US is its gargantuan size, the fact that it will generate its own electricity, and its remote locationโ smack-dab in the Chihuahuan desert, says Ahmed Saeed, a data center expert at Georgia Institute of Technology.
