- Think tank Ceres found power generation for data centers in seven states withdraws 3.4 trillion gallons of freshwater a year, or 10.4 million acre-feet
- The figure might be a bit overstated, as it counts withdrawals, including hydropower water returned to the river immediately
- 78% of electricity in those states comes from water-using plants, and 66% of those plants sit in water-stressed areas
Non-profit think tank Ceres has published a new report analyzing the water used to generate electricity for data centers across Virginia, Texas, California, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio, and Arizona.
Ceres estimates data centers use 3.4 trillion gallons of freshwater a year, or 10.4 million acre-feet.
Bloomberg Law’s Bobby Magill compared that unfavorably against the 8 million acre-feet California uses annually for urban purposes, a figure from a 2021 Legislative Analyst’s Office report.
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An important difference withdrawal versus consumption
Ceres’s approach makes sense, but it paints only a partial picture at best. It measures water withdrawals, or the total volume of water a power company pulls from a water source like a river, lake, or aquifer, including water it essentially replaces shortly afterward.
For context, the LAO’s 8 million acre-feet is a different quantity: water actually delivered and applied to residential, commercial, industrial, and landscape uses across California, and it is unlikely to be channeled back to its source.
Ceres does note this, stating that “withdrawal reflects the full volume an asset depends on to operate”, which it presents as a strong indicator of risk exposure to multiple communities that are already living in drought-affected areas.
A large amount of the power being generated and measured is hydroelectric power. This makes it a bit ironic, given that using water for generation may not be considered ‘consumed’ effectively.
The number seems considerably higher than one would expect: Arizona State University researchers, using 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory data, put the indirect consumption of US data centers, including power generation, at about 650,000 acre-feet a year nationwide.
Although the data are old, the numbers suggest data centers may be consuming a fraction of what Ceres implies, according to its own report, unless consumption rose drastically to 16 times its reported figure.
Ceres, however, for now projects that water for power generation could account for 72 percent of total US data center water consumption by 2030, on a consumption basis, even as cooling inside the buildings gets more efficient.
At a time when the two largest Colorado River reservoirs have hit record lows, Ceres noted that local opposition grounded in water and grid concerns disrupted $130 billion of data center projects in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
Shama Perveen, the report’s co-author and Ceres’ director of water research, framed this as a complex situation and one that required a more inclusive approach, saying “no single stakeholder can address these challenges alone”.
Whether it pans out at a time when AI companies are spending money hand over fist to get their hyperscale operations (and subsequent cooling and power requirements) out of the door as the search for AGI continues unabated remains to be seen, however.
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