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