American data centers in just seven states are reportedly using more water than all the cities in California

Date:
Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:25:00 +0000

Description:
Data centers in seven states are being linked to the consumption of 10.4 million acre-feet of water annually.

FULL STORY
Non-profit think tank Ceres has published a new report analyzing the water used to generate electricity for data centers across Virginia, Texas, California, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio, and Arizona.

Ceres estimates data centers use 3.4 trillion gallons of freshwater a year,
or 10.4 million acre-feet. Bloomberg Law's Bobby Magill compared that unfavorably against the 8 million acre-feet California uses annually for
urban purposes, a figure from a 2021 Legislative Analyst's Office report .

An important difference - withdrawal versus consumption

Ceres's approach makes sense, but it paints only a
partial picture at best. It measures water withdrawals, or the total
volume of water a power company pulls from a water source like a river, lake, or aquifer, including water it essentially replaces shortly afterward.

For context, the LAO's 8 million acre-feet is a different quantity: water actually delivered and applied to residential, commercial, industrial, and landscape uses across California, and it is unlikely to be channeled back to its source.

Ceres does note this, stating that "withdrawal reflects the full volume an asset depends on to operate" , which it presents as a strong indicator of
risk exposure to multiple communities that are already living in drought-affected areas.

A large amount of the power being generated and measured is hydroelectric power. This makes it a bit ironic, given that using water for generation may not be considered 'consumed' effectively.

The number seems considerably higher than one would expect: Arizona State University researchers, using 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory data, put the indirect consumption of US data centers, including power
generation, at about 650,000 acre-feet a year nationwide.

Although the data are old, the numbers suggest data centers may be consuming
a fraction of what Ceres implies, according to its own report, unless consumption rose drastically to 16 times its reported figure.

Ceres, however, for now projects that water for power generation could
account for 72 percent of total US data center water consumption by 2030, on
a consumption basis, even as cooling inside the buildings gets more
efficient.

At a time when the two largest Colorado River reservoirs have hit record
lows, Ceres noted that local opposition grounded in water and grid concerns disrupted $130 billion of data center projects in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

Shama Perveen, the report's co-author and Ceres' director of water research, framed this as a complex situation and one that required a more inclusive approach , saying "no single stakeholder can address these challenges alone".

Whether it pans out at a time when AI companies are spending money hand over fist to get their hyperscale operations (and subsequent cooling and power requirements) out of the door as the search for AGI continues unabated
remains to be seen, however.

Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/american-data-centers-in-just-seven-states-are-r eportedly-using-more-water-than-all-the-cities-in-california

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* Origin: capitolcityonline.net * KY, USA (1:2320/107)