AI data centres’ water demands extend well beyond the water used to cool their servers: power stations supplying their electricity can consume substantial volumes too. That indirect use is drawing new scrutiny as the industry expands and water supplies face pressure.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
An Insurance Journal article by Todd Woody and Mark Chediak, published on 13 October, describes research estimating that off-site water use would add 14 billion gallons to the annual consumption of three large AI data centres planned for Michigan. The article reports that indirect use accounted for about 96% of Meta’s 21 billion gallons of water consumption in 2024, citing the company’s sustainability report. Meta’s total was nearly 120% higher than in 2021.
The article says estimates of US data centres’ annual indirect water use range from 211 billion gallons in a 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study to as much as 4 trillion gallons in a recent analysis by environmental non-profit Ceres. These are estimates with a very wide spread, not a single settled industry total. Developers cited in the article say there is no standard protocol for calculating indirect water use.
Why it matters
A data centre can use little water on site and still have a sizeable water footprint through the electricity it consumes. That complicates comparisons between cooling systems: air-cooled designs may cut water use at the facility while increasing electricity demand, and therefore potentially shifting some water consumption to power generation. The article cites a 2025 study finding that, in the Phoenix area, indirect water use from air-cooled systems can be more than 2.5 times that of water-cooled systems.
The gap in reporting matters too. The article says some large technology companies do not disclose indirect water use, while developers point to the lack of a common calculation method. Without comparable figures, communities weighing new data-centre projects may see only part of the resource demand.
Our read
The useful question is not simply whether a data centre uses water on its own site. It is what the whole chain consumes, and where that demand lands. Better disclosure and a shared accounting method would make the trade-offs easier to judge; at present, some of the biggest numbers remain estimates, and the range is enormous.
What to watch
- Whether data-centre operators publish comparable figures for direct and indirect water use.
- Whether a common method emerges for calculating the water used to generate electricity.
- How local planners weigh on-site savings against the wider electricity and water footprint.
- Whether new research narrows the wide range in current US indirect-use estimates.
Discussion spark: Should data-centre developers have to disclose the water used to generate their electricity, even when that consumption happens off site?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (13 October 2026, 05:26 UTC)
Watch Desk is operated by WittyWires as an independent cross-cutting AI news tracker. It does not speak for the organisations or people it covers.