Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land

A record-shattering drought has racked much of the US. But the artificial intelligence industry is pushing ahead regardless, with the majority of planned datacenters set to be built in drought-ridden locations, a Guardian analysis has found.

About two-thirds of upcoming datacenters, which typically require a large amount of water to operate, are set to be built in places that have been among the driest in the country over the past year.

Of 809 planned datacenters, 517 are in locations that have been in drought conditions throughout the past year, according to data from Cleanview and the federal government, which grades drought across four levels of severity. A similar proportion of existing datacenters are already situated in drought-affected areas.

More than 60% of the contiguous US is currently at varying stages of drought, the largest expanse for spring in modern records, with a particularly severe lack of rain and snow in the south-east and west desiccating croplands and raising fears of a disastrous wildfire season.

Scientists have determined that the climate crisis, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, is worsening the duration and intensity of droughts in the US.

But a stampede of new datacenters are adding extra demands via their hefty energy and water requirements. Large datacenters, some the size of small towns, can require up to 5m gallons of water a day, equivalent to the water use of up to 50,000 people, in order to provide cooling to arrays of humming networked computers.

Overall, the multiplying datacenters across the US are set to demand as much as 73 billion gallons of water a year by 2028, up from about 17 billion gallons in 2023. Each 100-word AI prompt uses up roughly one 500ml bottle of water due to the cooling needs of datacenters, researchers have estimated.

“The AI industry is sprinting as fast as it can to gain market dominance, and the rest of us have to deal with a great increase in water demand in places already in drought,” said Christopher Dalbom, an expert in water resources law at Tulane University.

“Even if there wasn’t climate change, we’d be feeling the effects of droughts more acutely, because water demand is going up and up, to feed more people and water more lawns and crops. There isn’t enough water to go around. Now with this explosion of datacenters, I think a crunch point is inevitable.”

Companies such as Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are pouring billions of dollars into new datacenters, with developers often drawn to dry, sparsely populated areas, due to the lower cost of land and generous tax breaks. Arid climates are also thought to cause the least amount of corrosion to equipment over time.

One of the world’s largest datacenters, a complex twice the size of Manhattan, was last month controversially approved in a Utah county that has been deep in drought since summer last year. Meanwhile, Walla Walla county in Washington, site of a planned Amazon datacenter, has also been overwhelmingly in drought since July last year.

In Texas, two of the largest new datacenters are arriving in counties – Pecos county and Carson county – recently parched by drought. Datacenters could account for 9% of Texas’s total water use by 2040, researchers recently calculated, with the state’s water development board forecasting Texas will have to deal with rising overall demand and falling supply of water in the decades ahead.

While an immediate water shortage is unlikely, hard choices will have to be made to avoid future clashes over water access, according to Dalbom. “When we get into a situation where there’s a limited amount of water available, are we going to limit water to residents and businesses before datacenters?” he said.

“In the eastern US, we have always assumed an abundance of water, so the legal systems aren’t set up for shortages. We can’t just assume that people aren’t going to be asked to reduce their water use, while datacenters and energy won’t be.”

Concerns over water use, as well as rising energy bills, have stirred local opposition to a rash of datacenter projects, causing some developments to be curtailed or canceled. These concerns have become a political headache for Republicans – Donald Trump has been a vocal supporter of the AI industry – with much of the opposition coming from rural, more conservative areas.

“Ranchers are being told to be conservative with water, to not waste water, and now there’s a new competing interest able to get near unlimited access to water,” said Andrew Coppin, chief executive of Ranchbot, a company that helps ranchers track their water use.

“The concerns from farmers are real and justified. Datacenters are flavor of the month now, but we wouldn’t make the choice to only be able to have a shower on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. I mean, ChatGPT is a pretty nice tool, but most people would prefer to have a beef steak if they had to choose.”

Datacenter developers say the industry’s current water use is still just a fraction of what much larger consumers, primarily agriculture, already take, causing growing strain on key sources such as the Colorado River. Even the irrigation of golf courses and lawns sucks up more water than datacenters.

“Datacenter operators work closely with local authorities to ensure compliance with all applicable rules and regulations and to ensure operations do not stress local water supplies,” said Dan Diorio, vice-president of state policy at the Data Center Coalition.

“The industry is actively prioritizing responsible water use through operational best practices and innovative development strategies, often collaborating with local authorities and conservation organizations on water restoration and reclamation projects. Datacenter operators are among the few private sector industries actively investing in local water infrastructure.”

The sector claims it is making progress to replace standard evaporative cooling with more efficient technologies such as closed-loop cooling, whereby the same coolant, such as water or glycol, is continually piped among the servers to absorb their heat.

However, while such cooling systems save water, they need more energy to run. This power typically comes from fossil fuels, which unlike cleaner forms of energy require copious amounts of water to generate electricity.

Such a trade-off is evident at Meta’s huge proposed datacenter, called Hyperion after the father of the sun in Greek mythology, in Louisiana. While the facility will use closed loop cooling, it will also need the energy input of 10 gas-fired power plants that will use large amounts of water as well as emit planet-heating emissions.

“It will be an issue for farmers near the datacenter and if more datacenters are approved to draw down the same aquifer you get a death by a thousand cuts,” said Dalbom. “You may see the water table going down so wells will have to be deeper to access the groundwater. There will still be water there but cost more to access.”

Meta said that it will prioritize on-site water efficiency to the extent that its water use will be less than if the land was used for agriculture purposes.

“Meta estimates the datacenter will use as much as 1 billion gallons of water per year, drawing it from an aquifer currently used for agriculture, not from the community’s drinking water,” a company spokeswoman said.

The overall water impact of AI is far larger than datacenters themselves, however. A January study found that datacenters will be responsible for just 4% of the 30 trillion gallons of extra water that will be needed, globally, for AI expansion by the mid-point of this century. Power generation and semiconductor fabrication for AI will suck up much more water than the datacenters themselves, the report states.

“Datacenters are the most visible element to people but they are only part of the picture”, said Albert Cho, chief strategy officer at Xylem, the company behind the study. Cho said that datacenters’ water use will remain smaller than other large sectors, such as agriculture, and use of renewable energy and reduced water waste will help reduce demand.

“Water tends not to be the top-line consideration,” when datacenter sites are chosen, Cho said, but he added: “I think there is an emerging consensus among the major hyper-scalers about the importance of water stewardship.”

Yet the public backlash has been so strong – polling shows 70% of Americans don’t want to live next to a datacenter – that some states are considering new restrictions. California, Michigan and Iowa, for example, are mulling bills to require operators to submit regular reports on water use while others, such as South Carolina and Kansas, may force developers to use closed loop cooling systems. Lawmakers in New York have gone further, with plans for an outright moratorium on datacenters.

In Utah, the state’s governor, who last year asked residents to pray for rain amid a deep drought, has attempted to reassure voters that the enormous new Stratos datacenter will not endanger the Great Salt Lake, which was already shrinking due to water overuse and rising global temperatures. A group opposing the county approval of Stratos is aiming to overturn this decision via a public referendum.

The datacenter is backed by Kevin O’Leary, a Canadian businessman who has featured on TV shows such as Shark Tank and is a keen supporter of Trump. O’Leary has, without evidence, accused opponents of Stratos of being paid protesters or in league with the Chinese Communist party.

“There could not be a worse advocate for this project than Kevin O’Leary, who has been absolutely dismissive of people in Utah again and again,” said Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University and the executive director of Grow the Flow, a Utah environmental group.

A woman in Tremonton, Utah, holds a sign in protest at the planned datacenter near the shore of the Great Salt Lake. Photograph: Natalie Behring/Getty Images

“I haven’t found a single person in favor of this,” he added. “It has brought together urban and rural communities, farmers and environmentalists, linking arms against this. I think this project is mortally wounded as a result.”

The Great Salt Lake is “headed for an all-time low” and the massive 9GW of power needed for Stratos, as well as its cooling systems, will likely push the ecosystem into further water deficit, Abbott said.

“There couldn’t be a worse time to do this,” Abbott said of the Stratos project. “Climate change is causing important hydrological shifts and here in the west we have a less stable water supply due to the mega-drought. But, more importantly, we are also harvesting the fruits of a century of water overuse.”

O’Leary’s case for the project is that it would be a big economic win, bringing jobs and tax revenue to rural parts of the state while helping the US win on AI in its rivalry with China. Last week he agreed to make cuts to the scale of the project after pressure from state lawmakers and said in a post on X that he was “working around the clock to address every issue raised, from water usage and environmental impact to power generation and community benefits”.

A lawsuit has also been filed against the project brought by five local residents and a progressive group.

Worldwide, three-quarters of people could face drought impacts by 2050 all while datacenters use 9.3 trillion liters of water in the coming decade, enough to meet the drinking water needs of the planet’s human population for over a year, the United Nations has estimated.

Even when some withdrawn water is recycled by datacenters, “large-scale withdrawals can strain aquifers and river systems, particularly in arid or groundwater-depleted regions”, a recent UN report warned.

“We need to rethink our relationship with water because at the moment there is just this unrestricted demand everywhere,” said Abbott. “We are in systemic water deficit almost everywhere on the planet.”