Data Centers and the Water Crisis
by Sandra Steingraber, Ted Schettler, and Carolyn Raffensperger, the Science and Environmental Health Network
When we say that our photographs, videos, playlists, emails, documents, and applications are stored “in the cloud,” we mean that they are housed virtually in servers maintained inside data centers to which we have access through the Internet.
Data centers, of course, are physical places that exist in the ecological world. They consist of warehouse-style buildings with floors, walls, and roofs that cover many acres of land. And the servers they hold are physical objects in the form of very large computers, digital storage equipment, cables, and various supportive infrastructure.
Proliferating across the landscape as cryptocurrency mining and artificial intelligence (AI) operations accelerate, data centers do not require components that we associate with industrial spaces populated by large human workforces. Indeed, many data centers are fully automated with remote security and few on-site staff. Lights-out data centers require no windows, office furniture, break rooms, restrooms, conference rooms, on-site daycare centers, or employee cafeterias. And yet, however uninhabited by living beings, all data centers require prodigious amounts of water for direct and indirect cooling and so exert profound environmental impacts wherever they are located.
These impacts are nearly impossible to quantify. Data centers are surrounded by non-disclosure agreements, proprietary secrecies, and limited regulatory oversight. Currently, most of the pushback to their construction comes from nearby residents. Just the act of inventorying their locations, their end users, and the basic details of their operations is difficult work, as FracTracker’s National Data Centers Tracker mapping project documents. Nevertheless, some clear trends are emerging.
The water impacts of data centers are inextricably linked with their energy needs.
Data centers are energy intensive, requiring 15-100 times more electrical power per square foot than typical commercial buildings. Most of this energy is provided by the electricity grid that is used to power the servers and digital storage equipment themselves. However, some of it is used to push water to the data centers and, indirectly, to treat the water discharged by them.
An average-sized data center consumes 300,000 gallons of water every day, the equivalent of 1,000 residential homes. Large hyperscale data centers consume far more than this. This water consumption takes place both on site and off site and has four components.
First and most directly, water is used on site for preventing the servers from overheating. Traditionally, data centers use evaporative cooling. This water is drawn from a groundwater aquifer or surface water source (lake, river, or stream). Water usage depends on both local climate conditions as well as the type of cooling system, but much of it rises as water vapor into the atmosphere, is carried away by prevailing winds, and becomes unavailable for reuse near its source. Direct cooling via this method represents about 25 percent of a data center’s water footprint. A minority of data centers use air or other liquid cooling systems to dissipate heat, which consumes less water for this purpose. However, the scalability of these alternatives is not yet known.
Second, water is used, on site or off site, in the generation of electricity that feeds the data center. Thermoelectric power generation is water intensive, representing, nationwide, 40 percent of all water withdrawals. A data center that relies on air cooling systems instead of evaporative cooling has less on-site water consumption but more off-site water consumption. This is because an air-cooling design draws more electricity from the grid, which then uses more water both to make steam to drive turbines as well as for cooling purposes at the power plant. Either way, water is lost to the local hydrologic cycle due to evaporation.
Third, water is used off site to cool the machinery used in the generation of electricity needed to bring water to the data center and then treat the wastewater. Together, this second and third component, represents about 75 percent of the water footprint of data centers. With the trend toward hyperscale data centers, which rely more deeply on water-intensive cooling, these proportions may change.
The fourth off-site component, which has not yet been quantified at all in the above accounting, is the water consumed in the extraction of natural gas via hydraulic fracturing. Gas-fired utility plants, which exceeded coal as the nation’s leading source of electricity in 2016, are a primary source of power for data centers. Hydraulically fractured wells now produce 78 percent of U.S. natural gas, with hydraulic fracturing used in 95 percent of all new wells. Fracking operations, which require 1.5 million to 16 million gallons per well, are depleting groundwater in many arid regions of the United States.
As much as 90 percent of the freshwater used in fracking operations remains locked in deep geological strata and is entirely lost to the hydrologic cycle. The fraction that returns to the surface as flowback is permanently contaminated by fracking chemical additives, salts, radioactive substances, and heavy metals and is also lost as a source of drinking water. The demand for water to use in U.S. fracking operations has more than doubled since 2016.
The massive, indirect water consumption of data centers—both during power generation and, if the power is generated by gas-fired turbines, for the fracking operations that provide the fuel—makes estimating community impacts of a single data center nearly impossible. Although an increasing number of data centers are located adjacent to power plants and electrical substations, the power generation and fracking operations can also take place hundreds of miles away from the data center.
Note also that large data centers need to be outfitted with massive sets of back-up generators in case the electric grid goes down. These are typically fueled by diesel or natural gas, both of which emit prodigious amounts of air pollutants and help to drive the demand for more pipelines, powerplants, and drilling, further adding to the water footprint of data centers and also creating local sources of air pollution. At xAI’s massive data center in Memphis, Tennessee, which provides computational power for the Grok chatbot, portable natural gas turbines were brought in and assembled without permits when developers experienced difficulties sourcing sufficient electrical power from the grid. Video documentation from an optical gas imaging camera of the resulting plume of air pollution reveals the considerable public health risks confronting residents of the historically Black community. In August 2025, a Time Magazine investigation found that nitrogen dioxide levels in ambient air markedly increased from pre-data center levels in areas immediately surrounding the data center. At the same time, the expected water demand for direct cooling of the xAI data center is expected to exceed 5 million gallons of water a day in an area where the aquifer is overlain by unlined coal ash ponds containing arsenic, raising public fears that increased pumping will draw this carcinogen down into the drinking water supply.
We also know that data centers are disproportionately sited in water-scarce regions as their developers look for low power costs, affordable land, tax breaks, and a favorable regulatory environment. In 2021, one of every five data centers was located in areas in the United States that were already experiencing water stress, with many clustered around Dallas, Phoenix, Reno, and the San Francisco Bay area. In August 2025, the Tucson, Arizona city council unanimously rejected an Amazon-linked data center, Project Blue, out of concerns about water. Although the county had already approved the sale of land for the data center, the council refused to annex the site into city limits so that the center could purchase water from Tucson Water and immediately become the utility’s single largest water consumer.
The rapid proliferation of data centers, driven by artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining, is taking place within an accelerating water crisis driven by climate change.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centers around the world currently consume 1.5 percent of global electricity. With the meteoric rise of AI, this figure is set to double by 2030. Half of the world’s data centers are located in the United States, where their numbers of have already more than doubled over the past four years (from 2,600 in 2021 to nearly 5,500 in July 2025). IEA projects that data centers will account for almost half of the growth in U.S. electricity demand between now and 2030, with power demand from AI data centers alone projected to expand by thirty-fold.
At the same time, data centers dedicated to cryptocurrency operations, most notably proof-of-work Bitcoin mining, are also surging forward and are now in the top 100 sectors for U.S. energy consumption, although monitoring is scant, and the U.S. Energy Information Agency has discontinued the emergency data collection that it began in February 2024. A preliminary estimate in January 2024 suggested that annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining likely represented from between 0.6 - 2.3 percent of U.S. electricity consumption and is surely higher now. Forecasts suggest that data center energy consumption for all purposes could, by 2028, represent 12 percent of U.S. electricity usage.
With this surging energy demand comes surging water consumption.
Data centers currently operate with limited transparency on water use, according to FracTracker, which has compiled crowd-sourced, interactive datasets that tally permitted, existing, and proposed data centers in the United States. Federal oversight may be loosened further by White House plans, introduced in July 2025, to enable the rapid build-out of data centers by dismantling what regulations do exist and by offering exemptions to federal statutes and streamlined permits under the Clean Water Act.
Against this backdrop is a global water crisis. As increased planetary temperatures melt glaciers and dry up surface lakes and streams, global dependency on groundwater to meet basic human needs is deepening. But this groundwater is also disappearing via uninhibited pumping and extraction. Even without data center cooling requirements adding to the problem, the disappearance of groundwater is considered a critical emerging threat to humanity, contributing to unprecedented continental drying and shrinking freshwater availability for drinking water and agriculture. Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, for example, is now facing a dire water crisis that poses an existential threat to its 6 million inhabitants. Forecasts suggest that the city’s three groundwater aquifers may run dry by 2030 as scarcer rainfall and snowmelt fail to fully replenish them and unregulated wells continue to drain them.
Groundwater, which underlies one-third of the planet, represents thousands of years of raindrops. When it is pumped out of aquifers and used for, say, cooling machinery, most of it enters the world’s oceans, either via discharge into a river or by evaporation into the atmosphere that eventually rains into the sea. Even much of the water used for irrigation—a major use of water that rivals in scale thermoelectric energy production—runs off on the surface, evaporates into the atmosphere, or is retained within the crops rather than returning to underground aquifers. Indeed, the transfer of groundwater to the surface of the earth is now the top contributor of freshwater into the oceans, exceeding the volume of water added to the oceans by melting icecaps and glaciers.
As revealed by decades of NASA satellite data published in a July 2025 study, the extraction of groundwater is now the leading driver of sea level rise as well as a leading cause of land subsidence and the consequent sinking of 28 major metropolitan regions. This combination makes coastal regions vulnerable to catastrophic flooding while denying groundwater-dependent communities access to ample drinking water sources when climate-driven heat waves and drought are at their worst.
Water is a finite resource and a human right. Clean, safe water is a human necessity, not just for the health of an individual, but for the well-being of the entire ecosystem on which the health of people depends. Except in rare circumstances, individuals cannot provide their own water quantity or water quality. Our lives depend on the collective protection of water.
The government, at all levels, has an obligation to serve as a trustee of water for the public good.
In the United States, water is governed by patchworks of municipal, state, and federal laws that differ from place to place. Many states lack water quantity laws altogether, and there exists no body or authority to examine whether or not the water demand of a proposed data center will harm neighboring communities or interfere with competing demands, such as crop irrigation.
In Bessemer, Alabama, for example, residents recently learned that a hyperscale data center would require a 10 percent rise in electricity generated by Alabama Power statewide as well as 2 million gallons of water per day, amounting to one-third of the local utility’s total water supply. In Mansfield, Georgia, a 50-acre Meta data center spiked energy consumption by 34 percent and water usage by 200 million gallons per year. Nearby residents suffered severe contamination of their water wells and low water pressure as well as intense 24/7 noise pollution and light pollution from security lighting. Allowing projects like this to go forward threatens drinking water long into the future.
Accordingly, government at all levels must fulfill its sacred obligation to protect water for present and future generations by using the precautionary principle and evaluating cumulative impacts.
The precautionary principle is an essential tool for governments to use to fulfill its obligation as trustee of water.
“When an activity raises the threat of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be used to prevent harm.” Implementing the precautionary principle includes heeding early warnings, setting goals, evaluating alternatives to harmful activities, reversing the burden of proof and employing democratic decision-making, including requiring free, prior and informed consent before allowing harmful activities.
A key part of preventing harm to water is evaluating the cumulative impacts of proposed activities like data centers.
Future generations have a right to inherit clean, safe water.
In sum, present generations have a right to use and enjoy the abundant water on this beautiful blue planet and a duty to pass it on to future generations unimpaired. Data centers and other rapidly developing technologies that threaten water quantity and quality in ways that will diminish the health and well-being of present and future generations ask us and our children to bear hidden costs for the profits of others.