Technology · Issue 02
The other two hundred and eleven billion
On-site cooling is the political number: 17.4 billion gallons in 2023. The power plants that fed those racks used about 211 billion more. Data-centre water is mostly an electricity mix. Direct is the well. Indirect is the grid.
- On-site cooling
- Power-plant water
- Billion gallons, US data-centre power-plant water, 2023
- 211
- On-site / cooling towers, 2023
- 17.4
- Direct + indirect, 2023
- 228
- LBNL total range, 2028
- 469–844
The cooling tower is not the river
Seventeen billion gallons is what a county notices. Two hundred and eleven billion is what the grid already used to make the same electrons — LBNL’s 2023 split, about twelve times the towers. Add them and US data centres ‘used’ on the order of 228 billion gallons in 2023. The 2028 low case in the same paper is 469 billion total; the high case 844. The political hearing is about a pipe into a shed. The physical fact is a power plant, often a long way from the shed, already evaporating water to keep a steam cycle alive. Pair this with The power behind intelligence: 485 TWh in 2025 is a water chart in costume.
WUE is the new PUE
Power usage effectiveness taught operators to chase every watt. Water usage effectiveness is the next line on the same spec sheet. Evaporative cooling is cheap in watts and expensive in a desert. Closed-loop and rear-door heat exchangers are expensive in watts and almost silent on a well. Liquid cooling for dense AI racks can cut facility water toward zero and raise the electricity the indirect bar is made of. Google’s 2024 print — 6.1 billion gallons consumed, 7.8 withdrawn, Council Bluffs at 2.8 million gallons a day consumed — is what a single operator looks like when the fleet is still mostly evaporative. The investing tell is which new campuses are permitted as wastewater customers, and which still need a potable line.
The long view is a mix, not a tower
Siting a 100 MW hall next to a hydro dam, a nuclear plant, or a recycled-water main is a different water story from siting it on a gas peaker in the desert. The 211 billion gallons move when the grid does. Own the cooling stack and the wet-sited megawatt. Do not own a 2028 high-case coupon as if LBNL’s top of range were a forecast. It is a scenario band, and the low case is the one we drew.
Investing lens
Horizon 5–12 years · Educational, not advice
Most data-centre water is power-plant water. The investable surface is grid mix, wet siting, and cooling technology that trades a well for a watt — not a national withdrawal short.
Where the map points
- Closed-loop, dry-cooler, and liquid-cooling suppliers into AI halls
- Generation with low water intensity (nuclear, hydro) and data-centre offtake
- Campuses with municipal wastewater contracts
- Avoid a desert evaporative campus with no reuse and a peaker behind it
What can break it
- The 2028 high case (844 bn gal total) if evaporative cooling stays the default
- A grid that gets thirstier as gas fills a nuclear gap
- Local permits that treat 17 billion as if it were 211
CHART does not recommend securities, funds or trades. Figures can be revised by their publishers. Do your own research and consider regulated advice before allocating capital.
Sources
Every headline number traces to a named publisher. Contextual sources inform the essay, not the key stat.
- 01PrimaryLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory2024-122024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report
Shehabi et al., LBNL-200163 / DOI 10.71468/P1WC7Q. On-site US data-centre water 17.4 bn gal in 2023; direct 38–73 bn gal by 2028. Indirect (power-plant) ~211 bn gal in 2023; total 469–844 bn gal by 2028.
- 02CorroboratedMOST Policy Initiative2026-04-08Data Center Water Use — Science Note
Wrap of Shehabi 2024: 17.4 bn gal on-site 2023 ≈ 160,000 households; 38–73 bn gal by 2028. Google 6.1 bn gal consumed 2024; Council Bluffs 2.8 million gal/day consumed.
- 03PrimaryInternational Energy Agency2026Key Questions on Energy and AI — Executive summary
Updated path: 485 TWh in 2025, ~950 TWh in 2030. AI-focused sites +50% in 2025; all data centres +17%.
- 04ContextualUS Environmental Protection Agency, WaterSense2025How We Use Water
Household-equivalent arithmetic for LBNL’s 17.4 bn gal ≈ 160,000 homes. Pool top-off order of magnitude used to reconstruct the residential-pool series.
Keep reading
Data-centre water, in a field of almonds
Lawrence Berkeley counted 17.4 billion gallons of on-site water at US data centres in 2023. A 2026 path toward the lab’s 38–73 billion-gallon 2028 range still sits near 28. California almonds, from USDA acres at 3.0 acre-feet, sit near 1,355. US golf applied 531 in 2024. The campus can dry a local aquifer. It does not move a national ledger.
50×
CA almonds vs US data-centre on-site water, 2026 path
Forty-eight thousand, not seventeen
USGS last counted 48,525 billion gallons a year of thermoelectric withdrawals and 43,118 of irrigation. California almonds, on our reconstruction, are 1,355. US data-centre on-site water in 2023 was 17.4. The attached chart is true. It is also not the ledger.
0.04%
US data-centre on-site vs US irrigation
The power behind intelligence
Data centres used 485 TWh in 2025. The IEA’s base case still nearly doubles that by 2030 — and AI sites are growing three times as fast as the rest.
485 TWh
Data-centre electricity, 2025
2,500 gigawatts waiting for a wire
The IEA’s 2026 electricity report puts more than 2,500 GW of projects — renewables, batteries, data centres — in grid connection queues. The world spends $400 billion a year on grids and $1 trillion on generation. That is the distribution bottleneck.
2,500 GW
Projects stalled in grid queues, 2026
The century-long reign of coal is ending
In 2025, renewable electricity generated more power than coal for the first time in the modern era. Solar did most of the work.
33.8%
Renewables share of world electricity, 2025