What Nobody Tells You About AI and Your Water Supply

Last week during a workshop on AI tools in the classroom at Pace University, a faculty member asked about AI and water use. I expected the question. The workshop was about classroom applications, not infrastructure, so I kept the answer short and moved on. Here’s a longer answer.

Data centers consume water directly, through cooling towers that evaporate it to remove heat. US data centers directly consume an estimated 17 to 19 billion gallons a year, a figure projected to climb toward 60 to 110 billion gallons by 2030. The bigger draw is indirect. Generating the electricity these facilities use consumed roughly 211 billion gallons of water in 2023, mostly through cooling at power plants. A data center's water footprint depends as much on how its power is generated as on how its servers are cooled.

Location compounds the problem. Two thirds of new data center construction since 2022 has landed in areas already under water stress. Municipal systems supply nearly all of that water, and the infrastructure upgrades to meet rising demand often fall on residential ratepayers rather than the companies building the facilities. Transparency has not kept pace either. Most operators disclose only partial or aggregate figures, so the public rarely sees facility level numbers.

The fixes already exist - sort of. Closed loop and liquid cooling systems cut water draw at the facility to near zero. Siting near hydro, nuclear, or wind power removes most of the indirect draw tied to electricity generation. The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, built in 2012 on hydro power from the Connecticut River, has been proving this model for over a decade. But.... scale matters here. MGHPCC runs on a 15 to 19 megawatt connection with about 10 megawatts dedicated to computing. A single hyperscale AI campus now under construction can draw a gigawatt or more, one hundred times that load. Holyoke proves the cooling and power sourcing approach works. It does not prove that approach scales directly to a facility built for AI though.

Regulation is starting to catch up. State legislatures introduced more than 200 data center bills in 2025 and enacted over 40 of them across 21 states. Most of what passed addressed ratepayer protection and siting incentives rather than water directly. Roughly 30 of the proposed bills targeted water consumption specifically, and only a handful of those were enacted. South Carolina and Kansas are considering mandates requiring closed loop cooling. California, Iowa, and Michigan are pushing water use disclosure requirements. Virginia is taking a different route, tying grant funding to the use of reclaimed wastewater instead of potable water in cooling systems. None of this is settled yet. Water legislation is still catching up to where energy legislation was two years ago, and disclosure requirements are starting to follow the path carbon reporting took a decade earlier.

I told that faculty member the honest version this week: the technology to fix this exists, and it works today in Holyoke. Scaling it up is an engineering problem, and engineers solve those. What is missing is the will to require it before the next facility breaks ground.