St. Joseph County Water Advisory board welcomes local Amazon data center developers

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- The St. Joseph County Water Advisory Board welcomed local data center developers from Amazon on Thursday evening.

The 30-minute-long presentation given by Amazon representatives detailed water infrastructure surrounding their data center construction.

The initial reaction from water advisory board members, like board chair David Jeffers, was relief.

"The positives for me were that they don't use as much groundwater as we thought they did," Jeffers said. "It is mainly coming from the town of New Carlisle's water system and not from actual water wells on their site."

According to the Amazon representatives in attendance, the data center in New Carlisle requires around 35 to 40 gallons per minute.

But while that number is lower than expected, Jeffers came away from tonight's meeting a little underwhelmed with certain aspects.

"Little disappointed that they're not using a close looped system like some data centers are," Jeffers said. "It's an open discharge, once the water is heated up – basically gets discharged to the wastewater system."

On average, close-looped data centers are more efficient with water usage.

But, according to Amazon's presentation, they are aiming for more sustainability.

And what does that mean?

Well, by 2030, their goal is to return more water back to the local communities.

"We want to use as little water as possible," Presenters said. "The second is about reuse and in a number of places we're using recycled water instead of potable. The third part is about replenishment."

Tonight's meeting was also supposed to have representatives from Microsoft, currently building their data center campus in Granger.

However, they did not attend instead rescheduling their presentation to the St. Joseph County water advisory board for their next meeting in January.