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While AI has made data centers a water issue as well as an energy one, the most consequential efficiency work is happening upstream of the building — in chip architecture, advanced packaging, co-packaged optics, and AI methods that reduce the energy required per unit of computation. Because energy that is never consumed produces no heat to reject, these advances are water-conservation technologies as much as computing ones, a connection rarely made in public discussion. This WRRC Water Webinar presentation will trace that link from the transistor to the watershed and David Ebert will argue that arid regions hold an underappreciated advantage in cooling design, not only a disadvantage. The University of Arizona is unusual in spanning the full chain: semiconductor fabrication and packaging, photonics, AI research, high-performance computing operations, and water and climate science. The talk closes by showing where that combination can contribute.
David Ebert is Chief AI and Data Science Officer at the University of Arizona, where he also serves as Computer Science Engineering Endowed Innovation Chair, and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Ebert previously served as Interim Chief AI Officer and Director of the Data Institute for Societal Challenges at the University of Oklahoma and led the VACCINE Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence at Purdue University. An IEEE Fellow, his research spans visual analytics, explainable AI, human-computer teaming for decision-making, and scientific visualization. Ebert speaks internationally on human-guided AI and sustainable computing infrastructure, and was a keynote speaker at the 2025 Doha workshop on resilient data centers in arid regions.