Data centers consumed 264B gallons of water as drought hits nearly 63% of US

ChrisGreenHeur

I mean, if they would just stop launching the water via rocket into the sun after using it then it would not be so bad. I strongly suspect the water could somehow be re-used. Though we might need to spend several decades in r&d in order to figure out how.

kolinko

1-2% of the whole US consumption

H8crilA

That's about 0.25% of total water consumption. I.e. the entire country uses about that much per day.

LaurensBER

While it seems reasonable to comment about how we're using water it also seems like a complex topic. What happens to the (slightly warmer) water after it has been used? Is there a way we could return it in a way to minimise impact? I.e if we extract ground water should we inject it back into the ground? Would that even matter? In the end I have a feeling that the most efficient solution will most likely be to just increase the price of water during a drought. People will complain but it won't be long before the big consumers will happily adjust their consumption or move to an area with abundant water.

dTal

>According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, nearly 1 trillion liters of water were consumed by AI data centers in 2025 I'm sorry, what? "Palantir" wasn't bad enough? Anyway this is silly propaganda as usual. USA gets through over 300B gallons daily . Irrigation alone is over 100B of that. Most of that goes to corn for animal feed. You're not allowed to get all high and mighty about AI water use if you still eat meat.

mhitza

999 billion liters of water. From a quick search I gather that US citizens' daily use is around 300B gallons https://watercalculator.org/footprint/how-united-states-uses... I was just curious of the number and scale.

simonw

Just once I'd like to see one of these data center stories acknowledged that data centers existed before the current AI bubble, and maybe try to engage with the question of why nobody seemed to care one bit about them until the past couple of years.

MobiusHorizons

I feel like it’s disingenuous to talk about drought in one place and water consumption in another. Water is one of those interesting resources that’s valuable but only in huge amounts that make it largely not transported except for pipelines in very specific circumstances. So it’s not like water use near a plentiful source of water necessarily has any impact on water availability in a drought area (although it could for instance if the drought is happening downstream). There is plenty of bad stuff in the world it seems silly to invent new things to be upset about unless they are actually happening.

quickthrowman

There’s around 1M acres of alfalfa grown in California each year. Each acre requires around 5 acre-feet of water, or 1,629,250 gallons per acre. 1,000,000 acres * 1,629,250 gallons per acre = 1.629 trillion gallons of water. That’s just California.

gregatragenet3

Its about a third of the amount of water used to irrigate golf courses across the United States. (The number in the article doesn't specify whether data center water usage is just us-bound or global)

stevenalowe

The USA consumes 2 trillion gallons per year in lawn irrigation so what?