Think globally, worry locally
While there’s no risk of big tech companies literally draining the oceans to power the data centers behind their LLMs, even moderately sized data centers can have an outsized effect on nearby water resources. A single Meta data center in Newton County, Georgia, for instance, now uses about 10 percent of the entire county’s water supply, according to a New York Times report from last year. And the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin recently estimated that data centers account for 8 percent of total water consumption in the region, a rate that could climb to 29 percent by 2050 if the large concentration of data centers in northern Virginia continues apace.
That kind of concentrated water use can put severe strain on local infrastructure and water supplies, and has led to at least one situation where a data center siphoned millions of gallons from local sources without initially paying. The local impacts can be especially severe in areas that are already water-stressed; a 2025 Business Insider report found that 40 percent of planned and existing data centers in the US are in areas with “high” or “extremely high” water scarcity, as measured by the World Resources Institute.
In light of these concerns, the biggest tech companies are eager to project an image of efficiency and responsible stewardship regarding water supplies. Amazon says it has been letting data centers run hotter to use less water for cooling, helping it to use less water per kilowatt-hour than other major data center providers. Amazon also says it’s funding “50 water projects expected to return more than 5.8 billion gallons of water annually for use by local communities,” and Google has laid out 165 water stewardship projects that it says “are expected to replenish more than 19 billion gallons of water annually by 2030.”
If all the memes and worries about data center water consumption are helping to drive this kind of environmental responsibility among PR-focused big tech companies, that’s all for the better. But if your concerned friend starts worrying about AI data centers literally causing a worldwide water catastrophe, the actual numbers involved should hopefully put those worries to rest.
