The Water Center at Penn has announced an international collaboration with Amazon Web Services, the Water Environment Federation, and the Leading Utilities of the World to create the Water-AI Nexus Center of Excellence.
This center, which was announced during Climate Week NYC, will serve as a hub for developing strategies that both reduce the water footprint of artificial intelligence infrastructure and use AI technology to address global water challenges.
“The [Water Center] has two main aims that we’d like to emphasize: ensuring AI infrastructure as efficiently as possible, and looking at AI for water,” Emma Denison, the Water Center’s communications and student engagement manager, said. “[We’re looking at] ways that we can leverage some of the AI capabilities to solve pressing water management challenges that we're facing globally, like water scarcity and water management.”
This partnership follows a series of past Water Center collaborations with other industry experts, including a water management project with the Water Research Foundation and an infrastructure project with Catawba Wateree Water Management Group.
“The Water Center at the University of Pennsylvania is proud to bring academic expertise to this critical collaboration,” executive director of the Water Center Howard Neukrug wrote in a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian. “By connecting research, industry practice, and policy development, we can accelerate innovations that address water scarcity while enabling responsible technological advancement.”
Denison said that Penn is “especially well positioned” to help solve these challenges because of “[its] ability to bring together industry, utilities, academia, and communities in one space.”
“Being a neutral convener means we can foster trust and move conversations toward solutions that everyone can get behind,” Denison added.
Students on campus are also beginning to connect AI use to its environmental impact, especially the hidden costs of the tools that they now rely upon on a daily basis.
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“Students and professors are using AI every day, but most of us don’t realize its massive water footprint,” Engineering junior and co-president of Penn Climate Ventures Karam Alkaissy said. “As Penn students, we’re very privileged not to have to worry about clean drinking water, but that privilege comes with responsibility. We’re being educated to be global leaders, and tackling issues like water scarcity is part of that.”
The launch comes as AI’s rapid growth raises questions about the environmental toll of training large models, particularly the energy and water required to cool servers.
“Carbon emissions are definitely something that's worth focusing on, but from our standpoint, anything that runs large AI models rely on significant amounts of water for cooling,” Denison said. “In areas that are already experiencing water scarcity, this places AI development in competition with other uses of water. So, I think focusing on sustainable water use in these data centers is really important.”
The Water Center is positioning itself at the heart of a global conversation on how technology can be developed responsibly.
“Some of our goals at the Water Center are also to incorporate some community feedback where data centers are being cited to make sure their voices are being heard,” Denison said. “We are hoping that we can share some best practices and use cases for ways that we can leverage AI to solve some of the challenges that we work with.”
