How Menlo Digital Develops with Sustainability and Community in Mind to Operate with Near Zero Water Usage.
Water is quickly becoming one of the defining constraints in data center development. Communities are scrutinizing it. Politicians are regulating it. Operators are getting louder about their sustainability credentials, but while the public conversation is emotional, the engineering reality is precise-not all cooling strategies are equal, and not all “water use” means what people think.
As someone who has spent 15 years designing, commissioning, and operating large-scale data centers and as an adjunct professor teaching the only accredited community-college data center operations program in the country-the gap between perception and reality is huge. So, let’s close it.
This isn’t a fluff piece, and it’s not a press release. It’s a technical truth-telling about cooling trade-offs, why the industry is shifting, and how we at Menlo Digital approach these decisions with both clients and communities in mind.
Why Cooling Has Become a Flashpoint
Data centers consume power at unprecedented densities. In just the last 18–24 months, design standards have jumped from ~300 watts per square foot to 1,000 watts per square foot driven largely by liquid-to-chip cooling and GPU-heavy AI deployments. The heat these systems generate doesn’t magically disappear. It must be removed from a place it’s not wanted to a place where it doesn’t matter.
Historically, the industry leaned heavily on water-cooled chiller plants with cooling towers. Technically, they perform well, as water is an incredibly effective heat-transfer medium. However, the tradeoff is clear – cooling towers consume water every single day through evaporation. In areas facing drought, groundwater limits, the optics, or the reality, of large daily water withdrawals create real community friction.
This is where context matters, and where misunderstanding runs wild.
What “One Million Gallons” Actually Means
Headlines love big numbers. “A data center will use a million gallons a day.” It sounds apocalyptic, until you put it next to real-world water users:
- A single 18-hole golf course can legally use up to 135 million gallons per year, or ~370,000 gallons per day.
- Mining pulls 10–25 million gallons per day.
- Agriculture withdraws ~4 billion gallons per day.
- Residential customers (you and me) consume over 1 billion gallons per day.
By comparison, even a 100MW data center using a conventional evaporative cooling system might consume more than 8 million gallons of water each day. With air-cooled systems, that number plummets to near-zero.
So yes, water is important. But the scale matters, and the narrative without context is misleading.
Water-Cooled vs. Air-Cooled: The Real Trade-Offs
Water-Cooled Systems
The “forever thirsty” option.
Water-cooled chillers run two loops. The condenser-water loop feeds a cooling tower, that tower sprays warm water into the air, and you continually lose water through evaporation. That cycle repeats 24/7.
Pros: Highly efficient heat transfer.
Cons: Continuous water consumption, community concern, permitting complexity, and operational strain in hot or arid climates.
Air-Cooled Chillers
The “low-maintenance friend”- now with far better efficiency than people think.
Modern air-cooled chillers have closed refrigerant loops, no cooling tower, and no water consumption after the initial fill. Historically they lagged water-cooled systems in efficiency, but that gap has shrunk dramatically thanks to innovations like magnetic-levitating bearings and economizer coils.
Maglev compressors reduce friction, cut energy use, and make the system whisper-quiet-something communities notice long before they ask about PUE.
Economizer coils let you bypass the compressor entirely in cold weather, reducing energy use further.
Pros: Near-zero ongoing water use, simpler operations, quieter, and increasingly energy-competitive.
Cons: Larger footprint on roofs and engineering considerations at extreme densities.
And What About Liquid-to-Chip and Immersion?
Liquid-to-chip cooling is coming fast, but here’s the key point most people miss:
These are closed-loop systems.
The water inside them is filled once and stays in the distribution unit for the life of the system. This isn’t consumptive water use – it’s “technology water.”
Immersion cooling is similar, also closed loop, but adoption is slower due to risk perception, design impact, and operational changes.
These technologies drive density, which drives different architectural choices. But they don’t meaningfully change the water conversation.
So, What’s the Right Answer?
It depends. The process matters more than the preference. Every cooling strategy carries trade-offs- water, energy, footprint, acoustics, cost, and technical performance. Pretending there’s a one-size-fits-all answer is the kind of lazy thinking that gets developers in trouble.
At Menlo Digital, we approach cooling design around three non-negotiables:
- Technical performance and reliability for the tenant.
Clients today are highly sophisticated. Many have strict approved equipment lists. Others have strong views on cooling modality. We don’t build a rigid “take it or leave it” design and hope someone likes it- those days are over. Everything we build is intentionally malleable, because modern clients expect collaboration, not dictation. - Community impact, both real and perceived.
In Phoenix, Northern Virginia, Sunnyvale, and everywhere else we build, the community is now a stakeholder. Water, noise, traffic, and land use all matter. Air-cooled systems dramatically reduce water use and noise, which positions us as a responsible neighbor from day one. - Forward-looking cost and operational efficiency.
Innovation isn’t about being first; it’s about being right. Technologies like airlift compressors look promising, but we won’t experiment on a client’s business. When tenants adopt and approve new technologies, we incorporate them. Until then, we use proven, efficient, modern systems with clear long-term economics.
Why Menlo Has Chosen Air-Cooled as the Default Across Our Portfolio
This isn’t a Phoenix decision. Or a Northern Virginia decision. Or a California decision. Air-cooled is part of our basis of design everywhere we develop-because the data is clear:
- Near-zero consumptive water use
- Modern efficiency approaching water-cooled systems
- Lower community impact
- Simpler operations
- Better long-term alignment with regulatory and political realities
And when clients need adjustments, density changes, or emerging technologies, we design collaboratively and adapt as required.
That’s the job.
The Bottom Line
More data doesn’t have to mean more water.
Higher densities don’t have to mean higher environmental impact.
And cooling choices don’t have to put communities and operators on opposite sides of the table.
The future belongs to data center developers who understand the trade-offs, engage with context, and design facilities with flexibility-not dogma.
At Menlo Digital, that’s the path we’re committed to- engineering that’s grounded in physics, economics, and community responsibility, delivered through a collaborative process that gives clients exactly what they need without compromising the places we operate. Air cooled systems are just one of the ways we’re developing data centers with sustainability and the community in mind.
If you want to go deeper into the cooling conversation or explore the next wave of technologies reshaping data center design, let’s talk. We’re building for the world that’s coming, not the world that passed.