this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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Yeah data center bad, but what kills me is the water use thing.
It really seems to rankle peoples bungle, and in both directions, that yes data-center water use is bad, but its just utterly dwarfed in comparison to forms sources of water use. And this is something I can speak to with a fair bit of expertise, in that I've worked extensively in developing water-use analyses for water districts, cities, counties, states, etc. Its just a scale issue and like with that recent Hank Green video about recycling, people truly don't understand how many people there are.
For example, take the MAWA equation (mean average water allowance). Typical indoor water allotment (and there is alot of data to back this up) is about 200 gallons (750 liters) per person per residence per day. That includes toilets, showers, cooking, washing clothing etc..
So lets take the recent number from that NYT article about its data centers water use. I think the number was 2.5 billion gallons?
73,000 gallons would be the average per-person-per-structure indoor only water allotment, which again, is pretty well established.
2.5 billion divided by 73k is about 35k, which is a bit of an over estimate but makes no matter.
All of Amazons datacenters combined "used", and I use "used" lightly here because its not like the water disappeared, but it used less water than a small American town. All of their datacenters combined.
Using duckduckgo to get numbers on this..
Just.. put it into context. Say 1lb of beef takes about 2k gallons of water to produce. The average American consumes 50lbs of beef per year. So an average town of say.. 35k people would go through 3.5 billion gallons of water in beef consumption alone, annually.
And the same equations are going to hold for practically everything else humans consume. Its just... its all a matter of scale. And I agree, datacenters are not good. But the water-use argument is weak when you consider just.. something basic and well established like beef consumption, or golf courses. 2.5 billion gallons is like, 120 golf courses worth of water. Its practically nothing.
Data centers typically use evaporative cooling, so the water is consumed (released into the air). If they used closed loop systems it would be different.
Typically? Maybe in some arid climates without humidity but try using evaporative cooling during a thunderstorm and you'll find your data center shutting down from overheating.
~~70%~~ A large part of water usage in industrial nations comes from electricity generation. That's where data centers consume most of their water.
Edit: 70% is only true for Canada, globally agriculture consumes more. The US for example has ~40% each for agriculture and power generation.
Could you elaborate on the 70% figure? A quick search returns multiple hits suggesting the 70% number is actually related to agriculture, not electricity production. See e.g. here.
Or did you mean 70% of the water used be data centers?
Oh, you're right. I used the Wikipedia article as source and it said:
Yet the previous sentence said this was about Canada. Whoops.
Though in Europe and North America, where a big chunk of data centers are typically built, agriculture tends to have a lower share with industry (including but not limited to power generation) having a bigger one:
https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress