Big tech companies surge ahead in AI research, development, and implementation for services, tools, and products across civil, corporate, and governmental sectors. While many implementations are useful, there are many harms of this near-unregulated development, including these detacenters’ impact on the cost and quality of the fresh water a majority of them use to cool their systems.
Data centers are shooting up across the country by the hundreds, with plans for even more driven mainly by the usual giants Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Apple, and a multitude of other background AI developers and data center startups, for the growing explosion of AI research, development, and data storage.
But such technology and the infrastructure for it come at the cost of many disadvantageous environmental and social impacts, and one of these is the increase in the cost of water paid by the community in which they are located, as well as the pollution and strain on the freshwater sources that serve these sites.
Training deep learning models generates extreme heat, especially from Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), requiring even more intensive cooling than traditional servers, and the most used method for cooling the machines are water based cooling systems, which steam away more than half the water they take in, and discharging what is left -which is treated with anti-corrosive and anti-bacterial chemicals- into the water treatment system.
A single data center can consume between 3 and 5 million gallons of drinking water per day. Annually, these ever-increasing few thousand facilities across the southern, Appalachian, and midwestern states consume enough for tens of thousands of households and farms – with whom they are now competing in the breadbasket regions like Ohio, whose farmers will be increasing their irrigation this year at the same time data centers are also developing and planning to tap right into the aquifers.
But if the people and farmers up here in the wetlands have worries after three years of low rain, what about the drylands like Phoenix, AZ, which has 58 data centers with a collective water consumption equivalent to over 1.5 million residents, or like in Indiana, where
“…it’s suspected that construction activities associated with dewatering to make way for data centers and an EV battery plant have caused at least three residential wells to fail”?
Or the places around the country that are seeing a partial or significant decrease in water coming out of their faucets? While still paying the same price for the utility! These companies don’t seem to have any restraint in throwing up their centers there, against the long-term well-being of the residents.
“A medium-sized data center can consume up to roughly 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling purposes, equivalent to the annual water usage of approximately 1,000 households. Larger data centers can each “drink” up to 5 million gallons per day, or about 1.8 billion annually, usage equivalent to a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. Together, the nation’s 5,426 data centers consume billions of gallons of water annually. One report estimated that U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021). A 2016 report found that fewer than one-third of data center operators track water consumption.” 1.
And if they use that much for cooling, the added water requirement for the electricity to power these things is just as great, if not more:
‘After years of steady energy consumption rates, the Great Lakes region is expected to see a 2 to 3 percent annual rise in energy demand over the next ten years as data centers pop up at a rapid clip to support the AI boom. Not only will this growth rate place extra stress on local energy grids (and therefore on consumers’ bottom lines), it could also pose a real threat to water resources in an area where freshwater is rarely thought of as scarce.’’ 2.
And:
“For most U.S. data centers, this indirect use is significantly higher than direct onsite water use. One paper estimated that in 2023, using GPT-3 to generate a single text output of 150 to 300 words consumed a total of 16.9 milliliters of water in an average U.S. data center—2.2 ml for onsite cooling and 14.7 ml for electricity generation. It’s likely that efficiency gains in later models have reduced these numbers, but indirect water use still predominates.” 3.
Here, the larger Centers new beng built are expected to use 20 times the power of current AI Data Centers:
‘’A single modern AI data center can use as much power as 100,000 homes; many of the larger ones now being built are expected to consume up to 20 times that amount…
One study from the Lawerence Berkeley National Laboratory found that data centers could represent up to 12% of all U.S. electricity consumption by 2028. Another analysis, by Grid Strategies, says that up to 90 gigawatts (GW) worth of data centers could come online by 2030. That’s about 9 times New York City’s peak summer demand joining the grid in less than five years.” 4.
And of course, higher demand on old infrastructure needing to suddenly service the equivalent of over a million new residents will also cause the cost of electricity, water, and other utilities to massively increase to upgrade or build new infrastructure as well.
‘’Beginning Jan. 1, 2026, Columbus Water and Power customers will see water rates rise by 18%, power by 13%, sanitation by 8%, and stormwater by 2%. According to city leaders, these dollars will build out major projects, including a $2.3 billion fourth water plant. The department is also expanding its discount programs to offset the impact on customers.“ 5.
These concerns are not going wholly unaddressed, though, as some companies are slowly working toward zero-water and high-efficiency mechanical cooling. Microsoft and Meta are implementing closed-loop liquid cooling systems that circulate coolant within a sealed network, effectively eradicating the need for continuous water intake after the initial setup. Startups like LiquidStack and Iceotope are advancing immersion cooling, which submerges servers in non-conductive fluids to reduce cooling energy by over 90%. Additionally, the L.A.-based startup Karman Industries is leveraging SpaceX rocket engine technology to build high-speed rotating compressors that use liquid carbon dioxide as a refrigerant, allowing facilities to cool servers with zero water and 80% less space.
To address resource depletion, major tech players like Amazon and Meta have pledged to become “water-positive” by 2030, committing to restore more water to regional watersheds than they consume. Companies are increasingly substituting potable drinking water with reclaimed wastewater and exploring innovative storage strategies, such as an agreement in Oregon where Amazon stores 400 million gallons of excess winter water from the Columbia River 1,500 feet underground for shared use during the summer. Meta has also partnered with Arable to deploy advanced irrigation technology for independent farmers to save 200 million gallons annually, while firms like KETOS provide automated monitoring systems to track water parameters in real-time and minimize the contaminant footprint of wastewater.
and E. Data Centers and Water Consumption | Article | EESI. Eesi.org. Published 2025. Accessed February 23, 2026. https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption
2. Zaremba H. Data Centers Push Great Lakes Region to the Brink. OilPrice.com. Published February 16, 2026. Accessed February 25, 2026. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Data-Centers-Push-Great-Lakes-Region-to-the-Brink.html
3. Ren S, Luers A. The Real Story on AI Water Usage at Data Centers. IEEE Spectrum. Published September 10, 2025. Accessed February 25, 2026. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage
4. Walker C, Goldsmith I. From Energy Use to Air Quality, the Many Ways Data Centers Affect US Communities. World Resources Institute. Published 2026. Accessed February 25, 2026. https://www.wri.org/insights/us-data-center-growth-impacts
5. Shillcock G. Columbus may see higher electric, gas and water costs caused by data center energy demands. WOSU Public Media. Published December 23, 2025. Accessed February 25, 2026. https://www.wosu.org/politics-government/2025-12-23/columbus-may-see-higher-electric-gas-and-water-costs-caused-by-data-center-energy-demands
