Ann Vaughan

speaker

778 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Ann Vaughan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The MeatEater Podcast · Ep. 902: The Pros, Cons, and Complications of Data Centers · 13 Jul 2026 podcast

So we kind of think of the American West and the sort of more desert landscape as water stress.

So the Colorado River Basin for sure is an area of significant water stress.

The Ogallala water aquifer, which goes from South Dakota down to Texas, is another depleted aquifer.

And in both cases, there have been alarms sounded about water before the AI boom in these regions.

But they're, for a variety of different reasons, good places to build AI data center campuses.

Yeah.

So water is a factor in where they go.

And there are data centers being placed in areas with plentiful water too.

Well, you know, water is less, uh, it's, it's less of an, of a footprint than the energy that these facilities, um, but they're going to different spots.

So for example, you know, they're going to the Mississippi river Delta and, um,

sorry, really in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Okay, so water availability is a draw to go there, right?

And I literally was driving a week and a half ago through Louisiana past, you know, bayous where the tree trunks are basically swimming in water, right?

There's water everywhere.

Yeah.

And...

It's, you know, a farmer said to me that, you know, this aquifer will not, you know, does not have a drain, drain the, you know, the water supply risk.

Now, that does not mean that water is not precious everywhere, right?

And so, Texas is getting an enormous number of these new data centers, and water scarcity is a big issue in Texas.

There's a new study out of the University of Texas that looks at both the direct water use, which as I've said, is getting better data centers, and the indirect water use from power, which is getting worse in some ways.

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