Data Centers Tackle Water Consumption Challenges

On Monday, SpaceX updated its initial public offering documents to identify water conditions,including water scarcity, regulatory restrictions, and drought,as potential constraints on data center development. The acknowledgment signals a growing awareness across the tech sector that water availability is no longer a secondary concern.

The company is far from alone. Water consumption has rapidly become one of the most polarizing issues surrounding data center expansion. A recent Gallup poll revealed that 70 percent of Americans oppose new data center projects, with water scarcity topping the list of environmental worries. Facing mounting public pushback, several major tech firms are now working to demonstrate that they take the problem seriously.

Data centers rely heavily on water to cool their server racks, which generate enormous amounts of heat. A widely used method called evaporative cooling draws fresh water to absorb that heat, then sends it to cooling towers where it evaporates outdoors. This approach can lower operational costs and reduce emissions for large tech companies by cutting the electricity needed for energy-intensive pump systems. However, the trade-off is a substantial water footprint. Google’s facility in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which uses evaporative cooling, consumed over 1 billion gallons of water in 2024 alone.

A 2024 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory projected that hyperscale data centers could require up to 33 billion gallons of water annually by 2030 if they continue relying on evaporative cooling. While that figure is comparable to or even lower than other thirsty industries,agriculture and oil and gas, for example, where a single fracked well can use between 1.5 and 16 million gallons,it still poses a serious risk in water-stressed regions. The challenge intensifies during summer months, when data center cooling demand spikes at the same time as municipal water usage.

“Water is a highly local, highly regional issue,” said Shaolei Ren, a professor of engineering at UC Riverside. “It’s a limited resource, and we have to manage it very carefully.”

In response, some tech giants are shifting away from evaporative cooling entirely. Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle have all recently announced plans to phase out the technique to conserve water. This includes OpenAI and Oracle’s massive Stargate expansion, which spans multiple states, including a water-scarce area of Texas.

Google is charting a different course. On Wednesday, the company unveiled a suite of water-related commitments for the communities hosting its data centers, along with funding for water projects across the United States. Among the pledges are efforts to replenish more freshwater than Google consumes through local water investments, scaling up the use of reclaimed and recycled water, and publicly disclosing annual water usage at its facilities. (Other companies, including Microsoft, have made similar water replenishment promises. Google has been working toward most of these goals for several years.) The plan also includes a commitment to use “a data-driven framework” to match data center designs with the specific conditions of local watersheds.

Ben Townsend, Google’s global head of infrastructure and sustainability, emphasized that data center design involves far more nuance than simply rejecting one cooling method outright. He noted that the company has conducted detailed hydrologic assessments of its sites for the past four years to determine the most appropriate cooling strategies.

“Water is scarce in some regions and plentiful in others,” Townsend said. “A one-size-fits-all strategy just doesn’t work.”

In April, Google defended the use of evaporative cooling in areas with what it termed “abundant” water, arguing in a filing to the European Union that the technique is necessary for building truly sustainable data centers. That position aligns with recent research from Ren and his team, which found that if all U. S. data centers adopted evaporative cooling during peak demand periods, it could free up an additional 10 to 30 gigawatts of power. In regions where the electrical grid is strained but water is plentiful, evaporative cooling could offer meaningful relief to utilities trying to balance load.