Water demand: the double-edged sword of data centers

America’s data centers, now totaling 5,000 and counting, consume nearly half a billion gallons of water each day.

Artificial intelligence may feel weightless, but the systems behind it depend on resource-intensive physical infrastructure. As data centers multiply to meet demand, their appetite for water and electricity raises questions about shared resources.

How water powers AI

Each 100-word AI prompt uses one bottle of water (519 milliliters), according to scientists at the University of California, Riverside. This small amount adds up as hundreds of millions of people around the world use AI systems, often multiple times a day, according to Pew Research Center findings.

A medium-sized data center, like the 36,554-square-foot Equinix facility in Irving, Texas, consumes roughly 110 million gallons of water annually for cooling purposes. That consumption is equivalent to the yearly water usage of 1,000 households. Bigger data centers, such as the approximately 785,000-square-foot xAI plant near Memphis, Tennessee, can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day, or about 1.8 billion gallons over the course of a year, which is comparable to the usage of a town of 10,000 people.

America’s data centers, now totaling 5,000 and counting, consume nearly half a billion gallons of water each day. That consumption will only increase as these facilities continue to grow in number, size and complexity.

Meanwhile, the United Nations said in January that the world has entered into a state of “global water bankruptcy,” citing a report released by UN researchers.

“For much of the world, ‘normal’ is gone,” Director of the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health Kaveh Madani said during a news conference in New York. “This is not to kill hope but to encourage action and an honest admission of failure today to protect and enable tomorrow."

Indigenous Peoples, low-income urban residents and smallholder farmers feel the brunt of this burden, while the benefits of overuse are accrued by the most powerful actors in contemporary society per the UN.

AI power, demand and pollution

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, brought xAI’s Gigafactory of Compute, also known as the world’s largest supercomputer, to southwestern Memphis in 2025. Musk named the project Colossus after a film about a supercomputer that becomes sentient and takes over the world.

Training an AI system requires a massive amount of energy. xAI struck a deal with a local electric company for 150 megawatts of power and agreed to build a new substation in the area to meet this demand.

Residents living around the facility began to notice changes quickly. From the road, they were able to see and hear mobile gas turbines. The plant had at least 35 mobile gas turbines, each one capable of generating roughly 420 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 300,000 homes.

“I like to open my windows early in the morning to breathe the fresh air, God's given air,”
Memphis resident Easter Knox, who lived about 1 mile from the plant, told More Perfect Union.

“You can’t hardly breathe, it's like your whole world is collapsing down on you,” added Knox.

The plant emitted between 1,000 and 2,000 tons of nitrogen oxides (NOx) in a year, more than anything else in Memphis. In 2025, the American Lung Association gave Shelby County, where Memphis is located, a grade of “F” for ozone pollution.

These kinds of gas turbines release three main types of deadly pollutants: nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde and fine particulate matter.

Other pollution-causing chemicals combine with the nitrogen oxide to form ground-level ozone, which can cause and worsen asthma and COPD. Formaldehyde causes cancer, while particulate matter, also known as airborne soot, passes through a person’s lungs and causes heart disease.

“The overall concerns are water consumption, air quality and noise from on-site generators. Those impacts can be reduced by recycling more water and relying less on diesel generation,” said AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Alan Reppert.

“Even facilities that primarily use recycled water still require some fresh water, which can strain supplies. Continued research should help reduce that demand, while increased use of battery storage can allow data centers to rely less on generators and store cleaner, lower-cost electricity use for later.”

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