A retail data center uses 6 million gallons of water a year, about the same as a golf course. A hyperscale data center, the type that runs AWS or GCP uses 200+ million gallons a year. An “AI” data center uses an order of magnitude more. Those numbers are all on the low range. The higher estimates are 1.8 BILLION gallons annually.

Those are just direct water usage. Water is also used to cool the power plants supplying the power to these data centers. Even if they use new forms of cooling, like closed loop systems, those systems trade the water usage on site for energy usage. That increased energy usage uses more water at the power plants.

This water isn’t reused, like on golf courses, it’s not collected and recycled. It’s pulled from aquifers and rivers and evaporated straight into the sky. It’s not only destroying the downstream environments, but it’s destroying underground aquifers that humans survive on.

There is literally no way to look at AI data centers and claim they are good for the environment. And if you come in and claim that agriculture uses more, you’re just an idiotic troll. Food keeps us alive, LLMs do not.

According to scientists at the University of California, Riverside, each 100-word AI prompt is estimated to use roughly one bottle of water (or 519 milliliters).

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption

Most don't use closed loop systems, so the water is evaporated off.

And there have been several cases of cities having to restrict water usage to civilians because of DCs.

And there's that one that illegally made a second main connection.

Gr8 b8 m8 I r8 8/8

So, how much does Sam Altman pay you?

you mean the absolutely miniscule amounts of water they use compared to other industries?

Do you have a source for this claim? But also, are you aware that "other people are doing bad" is not a good reason to do bad?

Here is some reading you might be interested in.

There are two phases, and both consume water. Training, building the model in the first place, is intensely concentrated. Reporting indicates Microsoft’s Iowa facilities used over 13 million gallons in a single peak month while GPT-4 was being trained, more freshwater in a month than 130,000 Americans use in the same period.

Inference, serving answers to users, is smaller per request but never stops. As usage scales to billions of daily prompts, researchers expect the cumulative water cost of running deployed models to eventually exceed the one-time cost of training them. Both phases compound with every new model generation.

.The real pressure point is local, where a single facility can strain a community’s supply, and the most practical demand from researchers is transparency. Until disclosure improves, the precise size of AI’s thirst will remain genuinely contested.

https://techjournal.org/does-ai-use-water-data-centers

How about another?

Data centers have a thirst for water, and their rapid expansion threatens freshwater supplies.

Together, the nation’s 5,426 data centers consume billions of gallons of water annually. One report estimated that U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021). A 2016 report found that fewer than one-third of data center operators track water consumption. Water consumption is expected to continue increasing as data centers grow in number, size, and complexity.

.Approximately 80% of the water (typically freshwater) withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged to municipal wastewater facilities. The large volume of wastewater from data centers may overwhelm existing local facilities, which were not designed to handle such a high volume.

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption

One more for now.

Not only do they consume massive amounts of water, but two-thirds of new data centers built or in development globally since 2022 are located in places already plagued by water stress. Even before the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, communities complained about data centers guzzling millions of gallons of water from cities without much to spare (Bass et al., 2025).

Data centers evaporate 80% of the water drawn and discharge 20% to wastewater treatment. Residential evaporative cooling, on the other hand, loses 10% of water to evaporation, discharging the other 90%. The majority of AI specialised data centers use evaporation-based cooling 24/7 or, at minimum, during hot days. Even more data centers are expected to do so by 2028.

On direct water consumption alone, data centers rank in the top 10 highest water-consuming American industrial or commercial industries. Yet, a 2021 survey found that only 51% of data center operators track their water usage.

https://ethicalgeo.org/the-cloud-is-drying-our-rivers-water-usage-of-ai-data-centers/

But yeah, sure. "Miniscule."

🔻

I have no choice but to assume that you're being paid to say this shit.

Hey everybody! This guy's addicted to AI!

...see? Nobody cares.

Mid tier troll

oh no. now you're blocked