By Melissa Scanlan and Peyton McCauley
Data centers are being built and planned all over the world because to the increased demand for artificial intelligence technologies. These computers need a lot of water in addition to energy and land. Water is used directly in data centers, and cooling water is fed through pipes into and around computer equipment. By using water to generate the electricity needed to run the facility, they also indirectly use water. When fossil fuels are utilized instead of solar or wind power, the amount of water required to generate electricity rises significantly.
According to a 2024 study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, U.S. data centers used 17 billion gallons (64 billion liters) of water for cooling in 2023. By 2028, that amount might double or possibly triple. According to the same analysis, the electricity used to power U.S. data centers indirectly used an additional 211 billion gallons (800 billion liters) of water in 2023. However, in an industry that is evolving quickly, that is only an estimate.
Based on the shoreline of Lake Michigan, we conduct research on water law and policy. The Great Lakes region is being targeted by IT corporations to house data centers; one of the biggest in the nation is being proposed for Port Washington, Wisconsin. Due to its abundance of water and comparatively moderate environment, the Great Lakes region is a desirable site for hot and thirsty data centers.
More than 40 million people rely on the Great Lakes as a vital binational resource for their drinking water, and the region’s economy is worth US$6 trillion. Data centers may degrade nearby groundwater aquifers and compete with their current applications.
Technology businesses don’t always disclose the amount of water their data centers consume, according to our examination of government documents, public records, and sustainability reports put together by leading data center companies. We describe our approach and results using these tools to identify data center water consumption in a future paper in the Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal.
The most comprehensive and detailed information was generally provided by company sustainability reports. For example, one data center in Iowa used 1 billion (3.8 billion liters) gallons of water in 2024, which is enough to supply all of Iowa’s residential water for five days.
How do data centers use water?
Data centers’ servers and routers put forth a lot of effort and produce a lot of heat. Data centers consume a lot of water—in some circumstances, more than 25% of the local community water supplies—to keep cool. Google claimed to have used more than 6 billion gallons (about 23 billion liters) of water in 2023 to cool all of its data centers.
The cooling process in certain data centers uses up the water. Pumps force cold water through data center pipes in an evaporative cooling system. The heat generated by the data center servers is absorbed by the cold water, which then turns into steam that is released from the building. A steady supply of cold water is necessary for this system.
The cooling process is similar in closed-loop cooling systems, except air-cooled chillers cool the hot water instead of releasing steam into the atmosphere. The facility is then cooled once more by recirculating the cooled water. Large amounts of water do not need to be added continuously, but the chillers take a lot more energy to operate. The precise figures illustrating those variations, which probably differ depending on the facility, are not made public.
The amount of water that is deemed consumed—that is, taken from the local water supply and used up, such as when it evaporates as steam and is not returned to its source—is a crucial metric for assessing water consumption.
We initially turned to government data, such as that maintained by municipal water systems, for information, but obtaining all the information required can be difficult and time-consuming, and some organizations may refuse access to data because of confidentiality issues. In order to learn more about data center water use, we looked elsewhere.
Sustainability reports provide insight
Numerous businesses, particularly those that place a high priority on sustainability, make information about their water use and other sustainability and environmental activities publicly available. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Digital Realty, and Equinix were the six leading tech corporations with data centers that we examined. Both the amount of water consumed by the companies’ data centers and the amount of particular information offered in their reports varied significantly, according to our findings.
Sustainability reports provide a useful window into water usage in data centers. However, because the reports are optional, various businesses submit statistics in ways that make it challenging to aggregate or analyze them. The indirect water use from their power use, which the Lawrence Berkeley Lab predicted was 12 times higher than the direct demand for cooling in 2023, is crucially not always included in these disclosures. All of our estimations that emphasize particular water consumption reports have to do with cooling.
Although Amazon publishes sustainability reports every year, the company’s water usage is not mentioned in such reports.Microsoft does not break down water use for its data centers, but it does publish data on its overall water demands.That split is done by Meta, but only in an overall company-wide figure.Google gives specific numbers for every data center.
The five businesses we looked at that do report their water use generally exhibit an annual pattern of rising direct water use. Data centers are blamed by researchers for this tendency.
A closer look at Google and Meta
We looked more closely at Google and Meta since they offer some of the most thorough data center water use reports.
Data centers account for a sizable amount of both businesses’ water consumption. Meta used 813 million gallons (3.1 billion liters) of water worldwide in 2023. Data centers consumed 776 million gallons (2.9 billion liters), or 95% of it.
The image for Google is comparable, but the figures are higher. 95% of the 6.4 billion gallons (24.2 billion liters) of water utilized by Google operations globally in 2023—6.1 billion gallons (23.1 billion liters)—was used by data centers.
According to Google, its data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, used the most water of any of its data centers in 2024—1 billion gallons, or 3.8 billion liters.
With 10,000 gallons (38,000 liters), or roughly what one Texas home would use in two months, the Google data center in Pflugerville, Texas, used the least amount that year. Compared to the 1.5 million gallons (5.7 million liters) of water used at an air-cooled Google data center in Storey County, Nevada, the data center uses a lot less water since it is air-cooled rather than water-cooled. These are merely limited views, with the big picture hidden, because Google’s disclosures do not combine water use data with the size of centers, technology used, or indirect water consumption from power.
The data center sector is expected to continue its explosive growth in light of society’s growing interest in artificial intelligence. However, the public and government representatives will be making decisions about locations, regulations, and sustainability without full knowledge of how these enormous corporations’ hot and thirsty buildings will impact their communities and their environments if there is no reliable and transparent method to track water consumption over time.
Peyton McCauley is a Sea Grant UW Water Science-Policy Fellow and Water Policy Specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Melissa Scanlan is the director and professor of the Center for Water Policy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences.
