GoKawiilData centers consume significant resources, often to the detriment of local communities. But while water use has been on the lips of those fighting back against data center deployments, the sheer scale of their impact wasn't entirely clear until recently.
Many new U.S. data centers are being built on drought-prone land, and their cooling systems, which seem to consume gargantuan quantities of water, only represent a small portion of their total water usage by 2050. So, what makes up this overall figure for water usage? Cooling, of course, plays a part, but ongoing energy demands and chip fabrication also make up a larger part of the story.
They're consuming how much?!
A recent Guardian report on water consumption cited figures from Xylem, a water technology company. That does raise some questions about the accuracy of the report, and led us to dig further into the numbers from other sources. Although they're not quite the same as Xylem's original reporting, they do paint a similar picture.
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Quantifying the sheer amount of water data centers use isn't easy. Much of it depends on the specific hardware being used within the facilities, how they're cooled, and what the local grid infrastructure is like. In a recent MostPolicyInitiative report, it highlights that U.S. data centers in 2023 alone consumed 17.4 billion gallons of water. And that's before all the recent gigawatt+ scale data center projects kicked off. By 2028, direct consumption could increase by as much as 73 billion gallons as some of these new facilities come online.
But the keyword, there, is direct. The UNU Environmental Cost of AI's Energy Usage report from earlier this year highlighted how global data center electricity consumption required just under a trillion gallons of water in 2025. AI workloads account for around 20% of that, or 200 billion gallons. That equates to around 300,000 Olympic swimming pools. That share is projected to rise to 40%, or by 400 billion gallons, to a total of 600 billion gallons of water by 2030, giving it a global electricity demand in excess of the entire country of Nigeria and using enough water to supply 500 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa.
However, with 200 billion gallons of water (and counting) dedicated to AI workloads, how does that compare to other industries?
That's still a footnote compared to the or 26.4 trillion gallons used by U.S. agriculture in 2024 (as per USDA), but it is closing in on international oil refining numbers. OPEC produced roughly 86 million barrels of oil a day in 2024, and with a rough conversion of 0.4 barrels of water per barrel of crude, that's in the region of 550 billion gallons a year.
There are still industries using much more water than AI, and much more even than all the data centers combined. However, water use is growing dramatically, and it's not really coming from the increased cooling demands. It's coming from power demands and hardware manufacturing.
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