How much water do data centers use?

U.S. data centers directly consumed 66 billion liters of water in 2023, about 17.44 billion gallons, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's 2024 report to Congress. Their indirect footprint, the water evaporated at power plants generating their electricity, was nearly 800 billion liters in the same year, roughly 12 times as much.

How much water does a data center use per kilowatt-hour?

LBNL puts the indirect water intensity of data-center electricity at 4.52 liters per kilowatt-hour for 2023, against 4.35 L/kWh for U.S. electricity use overall. Dividing LBNL's 66 billion liters of direct consumption by the 176 TWh data centers used that year implies a further 0.375 L/kWh of on-site cooling water.

Do data centers use reclaimed or recycled water?

Increasingly, yes. AWS says it uses recycled water for cooling at 24 data centers and will expand that to more than 120 U.S. locations by 2030. Microsoft reports its Quincy, Singapore and San Antonio sites running on 74, 99 and 79 percent recycled, reused or non-potable water. Google says that where a local water source is at high risk it chooses air cooling or recycled water, and reuses treated wastewater at its Douglas County, Georgia campus. A volume figure alone does not distinguish potable supply from treated effluent, which is why this site records the source alongside the number.

Does zero-water cooling actually use no water?

Not once the power plants are counted. A closed-loop or air-cooled design removes almost all on-site water, and Microsoft says its design avoids more than 125 million liters a year per datacenter. But LBNL notes that waterless systems 'use more energy', and Microsoft states its design 'will increase our power usage effectiveness'. Because electricity carries about 4.52 liters of water per kilowatt-hour at the generator, the saving is cancelled if the change raises a facility's total electricity use by roughly 8.3 percent. No operator publishes the size of its own increase.

Do data centers have to report their water use?

There is no federal requirement to publish it. Company sustainability reports are voluntary and rarely broken out by site. State filings exist only where a regulator requires them: inside Arizona's Active Management Areas, for instance, groundwater rights holders file annual water-use reports with the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

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Data centers and water: the number under the number

Federal figures, direct and indirect, with the arithmetic shown · as of 2026-08-26

U.S. data centers directly consumed 66 billion liters of water in 2023 (17.44 billion gallons), up from 21.2 billion liters in 2014. Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report (report to Congress under the Energy Act of 2020)
Their indirect water footprint, the water evaporated at the power plants generating their electricity, was nearly 800 billion liters (211.34 billion gallons) in the same year: about 12 times the direct figure.
That works out to 4.52 liters per kilowatt-hour of indirect water for data-center electricity, against 4.35 L/kWh for U.S. electricity use overall, and an implied 0.375 L/kWh of direct cooling water across the 2023 fleet.
Hyperscale and colocation facilities accounted for 84% of direct consumption in 2023. LBNL projects hyperscale alone at 60 to 124 billion liters in 2028.
Cooling a data center without evaporation removes almost all of its on-site water but costs electricity, and electricity carries water at the power plant. On the national averages those cancel when the switch raises total electricity use by about 8.3%. How that works.

Most coverage of data-center water counts the water that goes through the building. That is the smaller number. The larger one is upstream, at the power plant: thermoelectric generation and hydroelectric reservoirs both lose water to evaporation, so every kilowatt-hour a data center buys carries water with it. Federal researchers put the upstream figure at roughly 12 times the on-site one.

That is why this site covers water at all. The electricity is the part we already track, state by state, and the electricity is where most of the water is.

What a data center's water actually costs, in water

Enter a size and utilization. The arithmetic is two published intensity factors applied to a load; it is not a measurement of any specific facility, and it does not know what cooling technology a given building uses.

Data center size (MW)

Utilization (%)

If cooled without water, extra electricity (%)

701 GWh/yr

Electricity: 100 MW at 80% utilization.

69.4M gallons/yr

Direct water, evaporated in the building's own cooling, at the 0.375 L/kWh U.S. data-center average implied by LBNL's 2023 figures.

836.8M gallons/yr

Indirect water, evaporated at the power plants making that electricity, at LBNL's published 4.52 L/kWh for data-center electricity.

2,781 acre-feet/yr

Direct plus indirect combined, which is 0.37% of the 760,000 acre-feet Arizona gives up in 2027 under the federal Colorado River guidelines. That comparison, in full.

Worked example above: a 100 MW facility at 80% utilization draws 701 GWh a year, which carries 69.4 million gallons of direct and 836.8 million gallons of indirect water, or 2,781 acre-feet in total.

Reclaimed, non-potable and “zero water”

A single volume figure hides two things that matter as much as the volume: where the water came from, and what the cooling design gives up to avoid using it. A facility cooled on treated municipal effluent is not competing for drinking water the way one on potable supply is, and operators increasingly say so explicitly.

2026-06-24 - Microsoft reports that its Quincy (Washington), Singapore and San Antonio (Texas) datacenter sites run on 74 percent, 99 percent and 79 percent recycled, reused or non-potable water respectively, and that its average water use effectiveness fell from 2.3 liters per kilowatt-hour in its early-2000s datacenters to 0.27 L/kWh in 2025. Its Phoenix datacenters improved WUE 23 percent year over year in FY25. Source: Microsoft, official blog
2026-06-03 - Google says it assesses local watersheds before building and 'only consider water cooling if local resources are healthy and resilient. If a water source is at high risk, we choose air cooling or recycled water.' In Douglas County, Georgia it reuses treated wastewater from the county water and sewer authority for cooling. Google reports replenishing more than 7 billion gallons in 2025 and targets more than 19 billion gallons annually by 2030. Source: Google, water stewardship commitments
2026-06-01 - AWS says it uses recycled water for cooling at 24 data centers and will expand that to more than 120 U.S. locations by 2030, which it expects to preserve over 530 million gallons of drinking-water supply. It reports a global data-center water use effectiveness of 0.12 liters withdrawn per kilowatt-hour of IT load in 2025, and says it runs air cooling for most of the year and uses water only on the hottest days. Source: Amazon Sustainability

Waterless cooling is not water-free

The other half of the picture is a straight engineering tradeoff, and the federal report states it plainly:

The above discussion does not imply low site WUEs are necessarily good. In many cases, there are tradeoffs between low PUEs and low site WUEs. For example, water-cooled chillers and other evaporation-based cooling systems are generally more energy efficient than an air-cooled chiller or other waterless systems. While air-cooled chillers use no water, they use more energy.

Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report

Evaporation is how a cooling tower sheds heat cheaply. Take the evaporation away and the heat has to be moved mechanically, which costs electricity, and on this site's own arithmetic electricity carries 4.52 liters of water per kilowatt-hour at the power plant. So a waterless design does not remove the water. It moves it from the local aquifer or utility to wherever the generation is, which may be another watershed entirely. The operators say the same thing about their own designs:

2024-12-09 - Microsoft's closed-loop datacenter design circulates water between servers and chillers without evaporation: the loop is filled once during construction and needs no fresh water supply afterwards. Microsoft states it avoids more than 125 million liters of water a year per datacenter, that every new datacenter design from August 2024 uses it, and that projects in Phoenix, Arizona and Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin pilot the design in 2026, coming online from late 2027. Source: Microsoft Cloud Blog
2024-12-09 - Microsoft states the same design costs electricity: 'Replacement of evaporative systems with mechanical cooling will increase our power usage effectiveness (PUE).' The company describes the increase as nominal across its fleet and says it uses high-efficiency economizing chillers at elevated water temperatures to limit it, but does not publish the size of the increase. Source: Microsoft Cloud Blog

Where the tradeoff breaks even

Those two published intensities give a break-even. A facility on the U.S. average direct intensity of 0.375 L/kWh that switches to a waterless design saves that water on site, but adds 4.52 L/kWh of power-plant water on every extra kilowatt-hour the new cooling draws. The two cancel when the change raises total electricity use by about 8.3%. Below that, going waterless genuinely lowers total water consumption; above it, the facility is consuming more water than before, just somewhere else.

That figure is arithmetic on two LBNL numbers (0.375 ÷ 4.52), not a measured result, and it moves with the grid. LBNL notes that source water is "highly dependent on the source of electricity": on a grid with little thermoelectric or hydro generation the break-even is far higher, and on a thermoelectric-heavy grid it is lower. Neither Microsoft nor any other operator publishes the size of its own PUE increase, so this page cannot tell you which side of the line a given building falls on.

Why nobody can tell you what the plant down the road uses

There is no federal requirement that a data center publish its water use. What exists is a patchwork: company sustainability reports, which are voluntary and rarely broken out by site, and state or local filings, which exist only where a regulator requires them.

In June 2026 Google published a set of water commitments it has proposed as an industry standard, including replenishing more water than its data centers consume by 2030, avoiding water-intensive cooling in water-stressed regions, funding local water infrastructure, pursuing reclaimed wastewater, and disclosing water use annually. Source: Google, water stewardship commitments
Inside Arizona's Active Management Areas, groundwater rights holders including data centers file annual water-use reports with the Arizona Department of Water Resources, which makes Arizona one of the few places where a facility's water use reaches a regulator by default rather than by choice. Source: Arizona Department of Water Resources, annual reporting

Every facility figure we can source →

Who pays, and where the fight is

Water is delivered by municipal utilities, so when a data center needs more than a city can supply, the upgrade is built by local government and recovered from local customers unless the developer funds it. Who pays for a data center's water → · what a kilowatt-hour costs in water, state by state →

The Colorado River is the sharpest version of this question in the United States, and it moved on August 21, 2026. Arizona, the Colorado River and the data centers →

Download the national figures (CSV) · Your state → · How data centers reach your bill →