Water infrastructure often gets less attention and focus than other types of infrastructure.
Per Lawrence Berkeley Lab, in 2023, data centers used around 48 million gallons of water a day directly for cooling. Most of this water will evaporate as part of the cooling process, and is thus consumed. If you include indirect water use by including their share of water required for electricity consumption, this adds another 580 million gallons per day. However, as we’ve noted, most thermoelectric power plant water use is not consumptive. Taking this into account, actual water consumed by data centers is around 66 million gallons per day. By 2028, that’s estimated to rise by two to four times.
This is a large amount of water when compared to the amount of water homes use, but it's not particularly large when compared to other large-scale industrial uses. 66 million gallons per day is about 6% of the water used by US golf courses, and it's about 3% of the water used to grow cotton in 2023.
We can also think about it in economic terms. The 2.5 billion gallons per day required to grow cotton in the US created about six billion pounds of cotton in 2023, worth around $4.5 billion. Data centers, by contrast, are critical infrastructure for technology companies worth many trillions of dollars. Anthropic alone, just one of many AI companies, is already making $5 billion dollars every year selling access to its AI model. A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.
