Project Jupiter AI data center build raises concerns about water usage in rural New Mexico desert — Oracle calls water usage 'negligible' for 11 million gallon one-time fill

Oracle's Project Jupiter data center is definitely an ambitious one, as its area spans 1,400 acres, or around 1,601 football fields, using a standard measuring unit. The build location is Doña Ana County, a rural desert area in the state of New Mexico with limited water supplies. As has become a common theme lately, the data center's water usage has become the focal point of a heated debate between residents, the county, and the developers, as detailed in an NPR report.

Residents are naturally concerned that an already-scarce resource will be drained further still, especially considering that the area's underground water level has been steadily dropping in recent years, forcing farmers to dig deeper wells to find a supply. Furthermore, the region is one of many affected by a Supreme Court decision meant to avoid draining the Rio Grande. New Mexico must reduce groundwater consumption by 5.9 billion gallons per year for 10 years. In Doña Ana and other affected areas, this means planning out the retirement of farmland, with all the economic and social impact that entails.

With all that going on, plus the overall zeitgeist around AI data centers, Jupiter's buildout generated quite the discussion. Most of the residents' concerns appear to come from the older build projects that included a power generation setup comprised of natural gas turbines and diesel generators, estimated by third parties to require at least a million gallons of water a day. However, Oracle claims it dropped that plan entirely in late April, turning instead to a solid-oxide fuel cell power plant that also has far lower carbon dioxide emissions.

Regarding the cooling for the data center itself, the firm has bought the water rights from a sod farmer who reportedly wasn't using them in full. Oracle says it's going to use a closed-loop system that will require a one-time fill of around 11 million gallons of water, spread across four buildings, and a maximum of 4,000 gallons per year for top-offs. The fuel cell system seemingly needs a 1-million-gallon initial fill and 168,000 gallons a year for top-offs, which Oracle says is less than the yearly water consumption of two average households. In an op-ed about the situation, the company calls these figures "negligible."

For once, the company may actually have a point. Those figures sound large in isolation, but according to a report for 2020, the county's farming used 410,000 acre-feet of water, equivalent to about 366 million gallons a day. The remaining daily usage for the county works out to approximately 45 million gallons a day. Although there's no shortage of stories about data centers draining local water supplies, their global usage is a figurative drop compared to activities like mere landscaping and golf courses, let alone industrial and farming use.

Oracle's revised plans and figures are all pretty recent, however, and Doña Ana residents claim they were barely given any time to properly analyze the proposals, or offered information about specific areas of impact for the drainage, particularly when the project proposal kept changing throughout the past year. State Rep. Micaela Lara Caden criticized the process, stating that it was "a $165 billion vote on a proposal that we knew about for less than a month".

In a council meeting last year, attendees asked the vote to be delayed, only to see four out of the five commissioners giving it a yay, prompting shouts of "recall!" by the audience. Susana Chaparro, the commissioner who voted "no," still holds reservations to this day, a sentiment shared by environmentally-minded people in the county. A local chile farm owner believes the county needs the project, but reportedly described the manner in which the county presented the project as "a fiasco."

Doña Ana is an embattled region, however, and Oracle pledged $360 million for schools and infrastructure, $50 million to upgrade a water utility that was found not to have been filtering out arsenic, and $12 million straight into the county's coffers. For a modest county with just over 220,000 residents and 40 settlements lacking paved roads and sewers, these figures represent a nigh-believable windfall. Manny Sanchez, the county commission's chairman, reportedly stated that "we've never had that type of money here in Doña Ana County."

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