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Data Centers, Water, and What It Means for the Communities Around Them

Data centers are the physical infrastructure behind everything digital. They're also becoming one of the more consequential environmental stories of the decade, and the water part of that story is the piece most people haven't heard explained clearly.

Max Stephens

7/10/20266 min read

The US has more than 4,000 data centers as of 2026. That's 37 percent of the entire world's total, and thousands more are currently planned or under construction. These buildings, which house the servers that run cloud storage, streaming, AI systems, social media, and essentially everything else that lives on the internet, have become one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity and water demand in the country.

The conversation about data centers and the environment tends to focus on energy, which makes sense because the numbers are large and the carbon implications are significant. But the water story is the one that tends to catch people off guard, because it's less intuitive, and the scale of it has only recently become more significant.

Why data centers need so much water

The basic physics here are straightforward. Servers generate heat. A lot of it. Rows of processors running continuously produce temperatures that would destroy the hardware if left unmanaged, so cooling is not optional. It's the primary engineering challenge of running a data center.

The most common and cost-effective cooling method is evaporative cooling. Hot air from the server rooms gets passed through a cooling tower filled with water. As the water evaporates, it absorbs and carries away heat from the air. The cooled air then goes back into the building to keep the servers at a safe operating temperature.

The catch is that evaporated water is gone. It doesn't return to the local water supply. Up to 85 percent of the water a data center draws during evaporative cooling is consumed in that way and lost to the atmosphere. The remaining portion is either discharged as wastewater or cycled back into the system. A medium-sized data center might go through around 110 million gallons of water annually. Larger hyperscale facilities can consume up to 5 million gallons per day. Google reported using 6.4 billion gallons across its data centers and offices in a single year.

Across the US as a whole, data centers directly consumed 17.4 billion gallons of water in 2023 according to EPA data. That number is projected to grow substantially as AI workloads, which require significantly more processing power than standard computing tasks, continue expanding.

Where does all that evaporated water go

Water doesn't disappear when it evaporates. It becomes water vapor and enters the atmosphere, where it eventually condenses and returns as precipitation. The same total amount of water exists on Earth. The question isn't whether the water vanishes, because it doesn't. The question is whether concentrating massive amounts of evaporation in specific locations at scales that weren't there before changes anything about where and how precipitation happens in those areas.

Researchers are actively studying this and the findings are starting to show up. Large-scale evaporation from concentrated industrial sources can influence local humidity, temperature, and precipitation patterns, a concept sometimes called an anthropogenic influence on the local water cycle. The scale required to produce measurable effects is significant, but data centers in regions like Northern Virginia, where Loudoun County alone has more than 27 million square feet of existing data center space, are reaching that scale.

Evaporative cooling also doesn't return the water it uses in a useful form. Even the fraction that gets discharged rather than evaporated often carries higher concentrations of salts and other dissolved solids, which makes it more costly to treat before it can safely re-enter a watershed. A researcher from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy said: even when data centers use reclaimed or recycled water, that water is no longer going back into the base flow of rivers and streams, which has ecological impacts for everything downstream.

The implication of this at larger scale is that regions with significant data center density are not just consuming local water, they're also redirecting how water moves through the local environment in ways that can affect aquifer levels, streamflow, downstream water availability, and in heavily concentrated areas, local temperature and humidity conditions.

The location issue

A Bloomberg analysis published in May 2025 found that a disproportionate share of new data center construction is happening in water-stressed regions. The reasons for this are largely economic and logistical rather than environmental. Cheaper land, favorable tax structures, available power infrastructure, and proximity to major internet backbone networks. Environmental suitability for the cooling model being used often doesn't factor in.

Texas is a notable example. A study from the Houston Advanced Research Center and the University of Houston found that data centers in Texas were projected to use 49 billion gallons of water in 2025, with projections reaching 399 billion gallons by 2030 if current trends hold. That would be enough to draw down Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, by over 16 feet per year.

Communities near data center clusters have increasingly raised concerns about competition for local water resources, particularly in agricultural areas where irrigation depends on the same aquifers and surface water sources that data centers are tapping. The economic argument made by data center developers, tax revenue and a small number of jobs, has met growing skepticism from residents who see a poor tradeoff between their water security and a building that employs relatively few people locally.

The health picture for people living near them

This is an area where research is still catching up to the scale of the problem, but the picture emerging from the studies that do exist is worth noting.

A study published in the journal Frontiers in Climate in 2026 identified multiple exposure pathways for communities near data centers: air emissions, water quality impacts, noise, electromagnetic fields, and light pollution. The study linked long-term proximity to increased risk of respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, mental health conditions, stroke, diabetes, and adverse reproductive outcomes.

The noise issue has received particular attention recently. Data centers operate 24 hours a day and the combined sound of cooling systems, diesel backup generators, and tens of thousands of fans can reach 96 decibels at the facility. Sound above 85 decibels is considered damaging to hearing with prolonged exposure. Residents of Bristow, Virginia, near Google's data center complex, have described sounds penetrating their homes continuously. A US News report from April 2026 documented multiple communities near data centers in Northern Virginia describing the experience as "living in hell."

Beyond audible noise, researchers have raised concerns about infrasound, low-frequency sound below 20 Hz that the human ear doesn't process normally but that the body feels as pressure or vibration. Chronic infrasound exposure from industrial sources has been linked in research to sleep disturbance, stress responses, headaches, and reduced quality of life. Residents living as close as 50 feet from data centers have reported symptom clusters consistent with this kind of exposure.

The EMF question is the one with the most scientific disagreement. Data centers do emit electromagnetic fields, primarily non-ionizing, from their electrical equipment and wireless networking systems. Most mainstream assessments conclude that EMF levels near data centers fall within accepted safety thresholds. More precautionary researchers point to a body of literature linking chronic non-ionizing EMF exposure to various health outcomes, particularly at cumulative or combined exposure levels, and argue that the novelty of hyperscale data center proximity as a living condition means long-term population health data simply doesn't exist yet.

What's being done and what's actually promising

Some of the engineering solutions being developed and deployed are a real step forward.

Direct-to-chip cooling circulates liquid directly over processors rather than cooling the air around them, reducing water requirements by up to 95 percent in some implementations. Immersion cooling takes this further by submerging servers entirely in non-conductive fluids, eliminating evaporative water use completely. Microsoft launched a new data center design in 2025 that uses zero water for cooling. These approaches exist, work, and are being adopted at some facilities.

The underwater data center concept has also been tested, most notably by Microsoft's Project Natick, which ran a sealed server pod on the ocean floor off Scotland for two years. The idea is that the surrounding cold seawater provides free, continuous cooling without any freshwater consumption or evaporation. The experiment showed that underwater servers actually failed at a lower rate than land-based ones, apparently because the stable temperature and humidity-free environment was better for hardware longevity. Corrosion from salt and the engineering challenges of maintenance remain significant obstacles, but the concept has not been abandoned.

Geothermal cooling, using the stable temperature of the earth itself as a heat sink, is being explored in regions where geology allows it. Several facilities in Iceland have built data centers around geothermal energy and cooling specifically because the combination reduces both water use and carbon emissions dramatically.

The more honest conversation is about siting. Building evaporative-cooled data centers in water-stressed, hot regions is a choice, not a necessity, and the environmental cost of that choice is increasingly being borne by local communities and ecosystems rather than by the companies making it.

Where this lands

Every AI query, every cloud upload, every streamed video draws on physical infrastructure that consumes water, generates heat, emits noise, and affects the communities built around it. That's not an argument against any of those things, it's a case for being honest about what the infrastructure actually costs and who's bearing those costs.

The technology to build data centers that consume dramatically less water already exists. The economic incentives to use it are not yet strong enough in most cases to override the cheaper alternative. That gap between what's possible and what's being built is where the environmental and community health story of data centers actually lives right now.

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