Google’s just-released 2025 sustainability report is an instructive example. The company said it consumed 10.9 billion gallons of water—a 34% increase from 2024—almost all for data-center cooling.
…
Google consumes around three times as much water indirectly as directly, according to a paper published earlier this year by Alex de Vries-Gao, a researcher at the Netherlands-based university VU Amsterdam.
—
My take: they should report this in acre-feet instead of gallons, and then compare it to a crop, alfalfa for example.
My back of the envelope says even at the larger number Google is using the enough water to grow about 23,000 acres of alfalfa. That would produce about 138,000 tons which would sell for about $34 million.
I find golf courses to be a more effective framing. Even if the alfalfa is consumed by animals, it's still a part of the food supply chain and gives people the easy response, "yeah, but we need to eat, we don't need datacenters."
Google's 10.9B gallons in 2025 is equivalent to ~55 18-hole golf courses (200M gallons/year average in the US). Which provided more value to the economy and to you as an individual last year? Google or 55 out of ~15k total golf courses in the US?
You might not use any Google products. But pretty much all of your goods and services providers do. Google is providing significant value to you second hand.
The $34 million gives the idea that the water is worth $34 million, but the water costs of growing Alfalfa (largely to be used in the extremely inefficient animal agriculture industry), are a small fraction of the overall costs. Labor and 23,000 acres of land and seeds and fertilizers etc would be a significantly greater cost contributing to the $34 million value.
My point was that google generates hundreds of billions of dollars from the same water that $34 million in alfalfa. It’s absurd to complain about their usage.
Water use policy is about agriculture, agriculture, and also agricultural. Everything else is a distraction.
Agriculture uses orders of magnitudes more water than data centers. A 50% cut in water use by data centers will have nowhere near the impact of a 5% cut in water use by agriculture. But data centers can generate orders of magnitude more revenue.
Say rain water is leaking into your house from two holes in the roof: one is 1 meter in diameter, the other is 1cm. Any effort you spend plugging the 1cm hole is a distraction from the 1m hole you really need to focus on.
You could make an argument that agriculture is different because we need agricultural products to live. But we don't need those specific products to live (alfalfa, almonds, etc), and they could be grown far more efficiently if water were priced by market rates.
Yes, just like you can't eat trucks, roads, grocery stores, tractors, combines, crop dusters, grain silos, mills, or the FDA. Any system needs many components, most of which aren't directly consumed by someone.
Desalination, turning unlimited sea water into fresh water which is one of the most expensive sources of fresh water, is ~0.50 $/m^3. They can literally manufacture the water they use with zero impact on the water table for ~20 million dollars.
Neat, implementing this would be a great marketing move for Google/OpenAI/Amazon/MS. Relatively cheap way to win a lot of goodwill from the millions of people who don't know much about the space but are swayed by current water usage arguments.
Of course location matters a ton in the water usage argument but I'm not sure how relevant this actually is when it comes to winning over hearts and minds.
I saw a criticism of the alfalfa comparison because, given the circumstances, there isn't anything better to plant where alfalfa grows. That you'd spend more water growing corn in other places or something like that. If we want to deal with alfalfa water use, eat less red meat.
Not sure how legit it is, but there is certainly more nuance to water usage.
I prefer the golf course analogy, which uses 2-3x the water of data centers and has dubious benefit to society beyond the entertainment for those who can afford the "green" fees
How much water AI data centers use feels like the least interesting reason to dislike them.
If I wanted to dislike them for environmental reasons, then I’d focus entirely on the energy consumption and CO2 emission from the generators directly hooked up to the data centers since the grid can’t provide them with enough juice.
If I wanted to dislike them for economic reasons, I’d focus entirely on the weird circular deals and mountain of debt.
If I wanted to dislike them for social reasons, I’d focus on how AI proponents themselves admit that the whole point is to take all of our jobs.
The water thing feels like a weird hill to die on. It doesn’t feel serious. It’s by far not the biggest problem!
It’s infused with biocide and other chemicals which can’t be separated by processing plants. It’s not evaporated, but dumped if the system is open loop.
It becomes unusable for consumption and farming. It becomes waste.
Closed loop systems and ordinary humidifying doesn’t and can’t “use” that amount of water.
You’re all over this comments section with “biocides” but what the hell even is a biocide? It sounds pretty scary (“life kill! Yikes!”) but a quick search tells me it’s meant to kill harmful things like viruses and mold. Add to that the fact that I’ve never heard it used in the context of pollution, let alone datacenter-based pollution, and I’m inclined to believe you’re not being serious. Also, what processing plants are supposed to be separating water from “biocides and other chemicals”? Are you saying that in an open loop system, none of the water makes it back into the water cycle?
I feel like it’s never made clear in what way the water is used up in these cases.
It’s not like it’s consumed like fuel. And it is not absorbed like in agriculture. But I understand it is not trivially recyclable either, the heat of the water alone can be harmful if released as-is. Does cooling happen via evaporation and is that how the water is “lost”? And I am not sure if it is contaminated in other ways.
What is the actual impact or opportunity cost of using the water in datacenter (or energy plant) cooling versus other uses?
Obviously water is renewable, but the constraint here is finite public water system capacity. When that capacity is allocated to data centers less is available for other community needs. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02705
When you're using water in a open-loop data center, you get in cool/cold water, add biocides and other chemicals to protect your infrastructure, then heat it and pump it back to the body of water (i.e. river, lake or an underground hole, or somewhere).
The result is unusable, somewhat toxic (since you can't remove the chemicals), deoxygenated (hot water can dissolve less oxygen) liquid which can't be used for anything, incl. farming or support any kind of life.
It's water, but it's not. It's not suitable for anything. Practically, waste.
If you use heat exchangers and closed circuits in outer loops, you don't waste the water and pump the heat elsewhere, and make that useful. Heat something in the winter, support greenhouses, provide hot water in the building, etc. etc. When you discard the hot water instead of recycling it in closed loop, you make it unusable for anything. From potting it to flushing your toilet. Every possible use case is gone.
If you need a toxic ballast material, maybe you can use it.
> When you're using water in a open-loop data center, you get in cool/cold water, add biocides and other chemicals to protect your infrastructure, then heat it and pump it back to the body of water (i.e. river, lake or an underground hole, or somewhere).
These are not power plants, there are zero data centers using open loop cooling that discharge loop water back into a waterway. It’s unnecessary when you’re cooling a data center.
The system is filled with water and begins operating. As water is lost to evaporation in the cooling towers, more water is added to the cooling loop.
At no point is any of the cooling loop water discharged back into a waterway, it gets recirculated through the system.
All that being said, closed loop cooling is much better in areas with a lack of water.
First, I don't see the banks of dry coolers or chillers required to cool that amount of water in many of the data center photos.
Second, our closed loop data center is not losing that amount of water, so losing 10 billion gallons of water to evaporation across that many data centers seems unrealistic, even with evaporation for humidity balancing and dry-cooler boosting reasons.
Sitting on top of a data center and directly working on it has its perks, apparently.
Adding evaporative cooling towers to a chilled water loop that uses chillers can double the efficiency.
A power plant that draws water from an intake, uses it to reject heat, cools it down, and then discharges it back to the stream/lake/ocean is once-thru cooling.
I feel like we've already had this discussion with respect to Crypto; crypto used more energy than banks (which proved to be false, but whatever); and water. Now AI uses magnitude more energy than crypto (or humans) and somehow they're now saying it's okay?
How is framing it the way society at large frames it dishonest? That “per transaction” is exactly the kind of nuance that never makes it to the public discussion.
Almonds producers in California use roughly 60-85 times more water annually than all US data centers combined, depending on the exact figures and whether indirect power-plant water is included.
Wake up, people! Stop the evil producers of almonds!
I wish these articles would clarify that there are climates where datacenters exist where water is not used food for cooling including evaporative cooling.
Just because the U.S. uses it doesn’t mean the rest the world does in every build.
Buildings are built for the climate of where they exist.
If a building can’t cool itself above 120 degrees Fahrenheit, that sounds like it could be common in the U.S. there are other ways to cool the building other water.
It would not be the same in a country like Canada, or other northern climates.
This water narrative is being used to undermine new datacenters in other countries, and it’s kind of strange a publication would so willingly not learn a and clarify the difference about buildings being built differently in different countries with different climates.
tl;dr: Because the power plants they rent power from, and have very little control over, use water too
Is that water cleaned and put back in the environment?
Can the municipalities use the tax cash influx to clean up their power sources?
Not answered or considered which is weird for an org as storied as WSJ.
The bottom line is Heartland re-industrialization will use resources and look different from previous industries.
Can we keep the political focus on the oligcharcal control over our government instead of making something as dry as data centers some kind of new frontline on the Omni-cause
> Can we keep the political focus on the oligcharcal control over our government instead of making something as dry as data centers some kind of new frontline on the Omni-cause
I imagine every side jumping on the water issue is exactly trying to distract from this. You'll notice you hear about water consumption issues much more than oligarchy and wealth inequality on "progressive media".
It's a real issue, and it feels like a bad faith claim that people are "jumping" on the issue as a distraction.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can call out wealth inequality and oligarchy, and also talk about the very real water issue with regard to data centers (and electricity, and loss of rural land, and other many other aspects).
I wasn't trying to make the claim in bad faith. I think as a casual observer, it's fairly obvious when a certain part of a conversation comes to dominate the bigger and more problematic part.
I'm all for responsible water use in data centers and I don't doubt that the cheapest, most environmentally destructive option is the one being used. That should be talked about, pushed back against, etc.
However, let's not argue in bad faith and say that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and then quietly forget about the walking (oligarchy/wealth inequality/decreasing quality of life/increasing cost of life, etc) while everyone yells and throws water stats around.
Google’s just-released 2025 sustainability report is an instructive example. The company said it consumed 10.9 billion gallons of water—a 34% increase from 2024—almost all for data-center cooling.
…
Google consumes around three times as much water indirectly as directly, according to a paper published earlier this year by Alex de Vries-Gao, a researcher at the Netherlands-based university VU Amsterdam.
—
My take: they should report this in acre-feet instead of gallons, and then compare it to a crop, alfalfa for example.
My back of the envelope says even at the larger number Google is using the enough water to grow about 23,000 acres of alfalfa. That would produce about 138,000 tons which would sell for about $34 million.
I find golf courses to be a more effective framing. Even if the alfalfa is consumed by animals, it's still a part of the food supply chain and gives people the easy response, "yeah, but we need to eat, we don't need datacenters."
Google's 10.9B gallons in 2025 is equivalent to ~55 18-hole golf courses (200M gallons/year average in the US). Which provided more value to the economy and to you as an individual last year? Google or 55 out of ~15k total golf courses in the US?
The golf courses in my town provide infinitely more value to me than anything from Google.
And I don't even golf.
You might not use any Google products. But pretty much all of your goods and services providers do. Google is providing significant value to you second hand.
The $34 million gives the idea that the water is worth $34 million, but the water costs of growing Alfalfa (largely to be used in the extremely inefficient animal agriculture industry), are a small fraction of the overall costs. Labor and 23,000 acres of land and seeds and fertilizers etc would be a significantly greater cost contributing to the $34 million value.
My point was that google generates hundreds of billions of dollars from the same water that $34 million in alfalfa. It’s absurd to complain about their usage.
Water use policy is about agriculture, agriculture, and also agricultural. Everything else is a distraction.
> My point was that google generates hundreds of billions of dollars from the same water that $34 million in alfalfa
Food is more important than whatever google does. :/
Radical Luddite posting on the internet is … something.
It wasn't the Looms / technology they hated - it was being put out of work and discarded.
What's your argument here?
I would love to hear why you think food is not actually more important than data centers.
How is everything else a distraction? We are overusing our water budget so every little piece on top is extra impactful.
Agriculture uses orders of magnitudes more water than data centers. A 50% cut in water use by data centers will have nowhere near the impact of a 5% cut in water use by agriculture. But data centers can generate orders of magnitude more revenue.
Say rain water is leaking into your house from two holes in the roof: one is 1 meter in diameter, the other is 1cm. Any effort you spend plugging the 1cm hole is a distraction from the 1m hole you really need to focus on.
You could make an argument that agriculture is different because we need agricultural products to live. But we don't need those specific products to live (alfalfa, almonds, etc), and they could be grown far more efficiently if water were priced by market rates.
That 1cm leak is going to lead to mold in my house so both need to be addressed.
Maybe imagine your in a canoe with a hole the size of your fist and another hole the size of a pin. Where do you spend your time to keep from sinking?
> data centers can generate orders of magnitude more revenue
You can't eat data.
Yes, just like you can't eat trucks, roads, grocery stores, tractors, combines, crop dusters, grain silos, mills, or the FDA. Any system needs many components, most of which aren't directly consumed by someone.
Missing the point. There's absolute bare minimum food that you need to eat regardless of everything else.
Alfalfa isn’t food.
It most certainly is. It may not be the food that you like to eat personally.
certainly second hand food via bovine
You are the one who is missing the point.
Am I? What point? In my comment I stated the missed point, yours is entirely devoid of real meaning.
I don’t really know how to rephrase it. It’s a distraction.
This article could have been about shipping alfalfa to the Middle East and Asia, but instead it was about this.
That’s not a distraction. It’s one of the many ways in which data centers are problematic. Why shouldn’t it be talked about as such?
To add on, that is just ~40 million m^3 of water.
Desalination, turning unlimited sea water into fresh water which is one of the most expensive sources of fresh water, is ~0.50 $/m^3. They can literally manufacture the water they use with zero impact on the water table for ~20 million dollars.
Neat, implementing this would be a great marketing move for Google/OpenAI/Amazon/MS. Relatively cheap way to win a lot of goodwill from the millions of people who don't know much about the space but are swayed by current water usage arguments.
Of course location matters a ton in the water usage argument but I'm not sure how relevant this actually is when it comes to winning over hearts and minds.
I saw a criticism of the alfalfa comparison because, given the circumstances, there isn't anything better to plant where alfalfa grows. That you'd spend more water growing corn in other places or something like that. If we want to deal with alfalfa water use, eat less red meat.
Not sure how legit it is, but there is certainly more nuance to water usage.
I prefer the golf course analogy, which uses 2-3x the water of data centers and has dubious benefit to society beyond the entertainment for those who can afford the "green" fees
How much water AI data centers use feels like the least interesting reason to dislike them.
If I wanted to dislike them for environmental reasons, then I’d focus entirely on the energy consumption and CO2 emission from the generators directly hooked up to the data centers since the grid can’t provide them with enough juice.
If I wanted to dislike them for economic reasons, I’d focus entirely on the weird circular deals and mountain of debt.
If I wanted to dislike them for social reasons, I’d focus on how AI proponents themselves admit that the whole point is to take all of our jobs.
The water thing feels like a weird hill to die on. It doesn’t feel serious. It’s by far not the biggest problem!
> It’s by far not the biggest problem!
Yeah, you're right. Some parts of the world is running out of fresh/clean water. We can drink coke instead.
The water isn’t destroyed, though, is it? It evaporates, right? So it isn’t lost?
It’s infused with biocide and other chemicals which can’t be separated by processing plants. It’s not evaporated, but dumped if the system is open loop.
It becomes unusable for consumption and farming. It becomes waste.
Closed loop systems and ordinary humidifying doesn’t and can’t “use” that amount of water.
You’re all over this comments section with “biocides” but what the hell even is a biocide? It sounds pretty scary (“life kill! Yikes!”) but a quick search tells me it’s meant to kill harmful things like viruses and mold. Add to that the fact that I’ve never heard it used in the context of pollution, let alone datacenter-based pollution, and I’m inclined to believe you’re not being serious. Also, what processing plants are supposed to be separating water from “biocides and other chemicals”? Are you saying that in an open loop system, none of the water makes it back into the water cycle?
I don't think anyone who is seriously opposing data centers is making water their only or primary argument
I feel like it’s never made clear in what way the water is used up in these cases.
It’s not like it’s consumed like fuel. And it is not absorbed like in agriculture. But I understand it is not trivially recyclable either, the heat of the water alone can be harmful if released as-is. Does cooling happen via evaporation and is that how the water is “lost”? And I am not sure if it is contaminated in other ways.
What is the actual impact or opportunity cost of using the water in datacenter (or energy plant) cooling versus other uses?
Obviously water is renewable, but the constraint here is finite public water system capacity. When that capacity is allocated to data centers less is available for other community needs. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02705
The water you infuse with biocides is not "immediately renewable". You can't send it to your water management center and just pump back to people.
When you're using water in a open-loop data center, you get in cool/cold water, add biocides and other chemicals to protect your infrastructure, then heat it and pump it back to the body of water (i.e. river, lake or an underground hole, or somewhere).
The result is unusable, somewhat toxic (since you can't remove the chemicals), deoxygenated (hot water can dissolve less oxygen) liquid which can't be used for anything, incl. farming or support any kind of life.
It's water, but it's not. It's not suitable for anything. Practically, waste.
If you use heat exchangers and closed circuits in outer loops, you don't waste the water and pump the heat elsewhere, and make that useful. Heat something in the winter, support greenhouses, provide hot water in the building, etc. etc. When you discard the hot water instead of recycling it in closed loop, you make it unusable for anything. From potting it to flushing your toilet. Every possible use case is gone.
If you need a toxic ballast material, maybe you can use it.
> When you're using water in a open-loop data center, you get in cool/cold water, add biocides and other chemicals to protect your infrastructure, then heat it and pump it back to the body of water (i.e. river, lake or an underground hole, or somewhere).
These are not power plants, there are zero data centers using open loop cooling that discharge loop water back into a waterway. It’s unnecessary when you’re cooling a data center.
The system is filled with water and begins operating. As water is lost to evaporation in the cooling towers, more water is added to the cooling loop.
At no point is any of the cooling loop water discharged back into a waterway, it gets recirculated through the system.
All that being said, closed loop cooling is much better in areas with a lack of water.
I'm not sure, because of two reasons.
First, I don't see the banks of dry coolers or chillers required to cool that amount of water in many of the data center photos.
Second, our closed loop data center is not losing that amount of water, so losing 10 billion gallons of water to evaporation across that many data centers seems unrealistic, even with evaporation for humidity balancing and dry-cooler boosting reasons.
Sitting on top of a data center and directly working on it has its perks, apparently.
“Open loop” cooling means there are evaporative cooling towers being used to cool the chilled water loop water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower
Adding evaporative cooling towers to a chilled water loop that uses chillers can double the efficiency.
A power plant that draws water from an intake, uses it to reject heat, cools it down, and then discharges it back to the stream/lake/ocean is once-thru cooling.
Well the point of the article is that water usage is much worse in the power plant capacity necessary to feed datacenters.
I feel like we've already had this discussion with respect to Crypto; crypto used more energy than banks (which proved to be false, but whatever); and water. Now AI uses magnitude more energy than crypto (or humans) and somehow they're now saying it's okay?
That's a great fallacies of our times:
We're all grown up children at the end of the day. We like our toys and are in denial of its harms. Scale doesn't matter.BTW, I believe that AI is a good thing in its ideal case, but we need to sort its energy use and data ethics issues.
> crypto used more energy than banks (which proved to be false, but whatever)
The true accusation was that crypto used more energy than banks per transaction. Your framing is very dishonest.
How is framing it the way society at large frames it dishonest? That “per transaction” is exactly the kind of nuance that never makes it to the public discussion.
Why can it not be ealtwater for cooling?
Corrosion, would be my guess.
Almonds producers in California use roughly 60-85 times more water annually than all US data centers combined, depending on the exact figures and whether indirect power-plant water is included.
Wake up, people! Stop the evil producers of almonds!
I can't eat data centers. Almond milk, OTOH, is a great non-dairy substitute for my cereal.
Very true (I have almond milk in my fridge at all times), but we can't eat golf courses either and they use a lot more water.
I wish these articles would clarify that there are climates where datacenters exist where water is not used food for cooling including evaporative cooling.
Just because the U.S. uses it doesn’t mean the rest the world does in every build.
Buildings are built for the climate of where they exist.
If a building can’t cool itself above 120 degrees Fahrenheit, that sounds like it could be common in the U.S. there are other ways to cool the building other water.
It would not be the same in a country like Canada, or other northern climates.
This water narrative is being used to undermine new datacenters in other countries, and it’s kind of strange a publication would so willingly not learn a and clarify the difference about buildings being built differently in different countries with different climates.
U.S. can also do closed loop liquid cooling, though. No?
With drycoolers or chillers, you can pump out enormous amount of heat energy out of water, even in hot climates.
tl;dr: Because the power plants they rent power from, and have very little control over, use water too
Is that water cleaned and put back in the environment?
Can the municipalities use the tax cash influx to clean up their power sources?
Not answered or considered which is weird for an org as storied as WSJ.
The bottom line is Heartland re-industrialization will use resources and look different from previous industries.
Can we keep the political focus on the oligcharcal control over our government instead of making something as dry as data centers some kind of new frontline on the Omni-cause
> Can we keep the political focus on the oligcharcal control over our government instead of making something as dry as data centers some kind of new frontline on the Omni-cause
I imagine every side jumping on the water issue is exactly trying to distract from this. You'll notice you hear about water consumption issues much more than oligarchy and wealth inequality on "progressive media".
> I imagine every side jumping on the water issue is exactly trying to distract from this.
With the planet heating up at an enormous pace and we have a new hip word called "Water Scarcity" with a cool map (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity#/media/File:Wat...),
I don't think this is a distraction.
It's a real issue, and it feels like a bad faith claim that people are "jumping" on the issue as a distraction.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can call out wealth inequality and oligarchy, and also talk about the very real water issue with regard to data centers (and electricity, and loss of rural land, and other many other aspects).
I wasn't trying to make the claim in bad faith. I think as a casual observer, it's fairly obvious when a certain part of a conversation comes to dominate the bigger and more problematic part.
I'm all for responsible water use in data centers and I don't doubt that the cheapest, most environmentally destructive option is the one being used. That should be talked about, pushed back against, etc.
However, let's not argue in bad faith and say that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and then quietly forget about the walking (oligarchy/wealth inequality/decreasing quality of life/increasing cost of life, etc) while everyone yells and throws water stats around.