A data center in Vernon (Los Angeles County) is pictured in 2025. A surge in demand for AI infrastructure is fueling a boom in data centers that adds stress to water availability.

As the data center boom accelerates to power the rise of artificial intelligence, concerns about the impacts of these behemoth structures typically focus on their energy consumption. While energy impacts are important, leaders in arid regions around the world should be just as attentive to water use — for cooling servers and power generation.

If local and state leaders don’t quickly step up with a smart, proactive response, already over-allocated water systems across the western  U.S., and indeed the world, will shift even further out of balance, with existing water needs pitted against a new competitor. This is a recipe for heightened water inequity and strain on already challenged communities and ecosystems.

In order to make sure that developers don’t just seek out locations where land is cheap or communities are less equipped to push back against big tech, California and other states should require disclosures from companies on the projected water use for each proposed data center. Instead of finding ways to merely reduce their impacts, let’s flip the narrative and require tech companies to design data center projects that actually improve water security and help communities.

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Rather than parachuting into a community with a project, tech companies and data center developers should start the process with conversations with residents. We need executives and developers to start asking themselves, “How can we improve the local water situation, rather than exacerbating its stress?” Answering that question begins with proposing the design that uses the least amount of water and could extend to cleaning up contaminated water supplies, paying for upgrades to local treatment systems and expanding groundwater monitoring programs.  

But big tech has yet to take that path, which helps explain why more than 230 environmental groups have called for a moratorium on new data centers, and $98 billion worth of projects were blocked or delayed in the second quarter of 2025 — more than the total of all quarters since 2023, according to Data Center Watch. 

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For now, water use by data centers is a drop in the bucket compared to that of other water uses. For comparison, irrigated agriculture uses 70% of water supplies globally to grow food. 

But global numbers don’t tell the whole story — water use is inherently local. In the arid states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, data centers could have annual on-site consumptive water use of 7 billion gallons in 2035, or enough water to support 194,000 people per year, according to a report by Western Resource Advocates. 

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Unfortunately, tech companies are often not fully transparent about water use. Microsoft’s Community-First AI Infrastructure Initiative committed to “greater local transparency” by publishing water use data for “each datacenter region” — not water use by each data center, a more relevant metric for the local context.

Two of the largest data center projects in the West are proposed in water-challenged, economically disadvantaged regions — Imperial County and Doña County, N.M. — and both have been less than forthcoming about water use. 

The Imperial County project proposes using 750,000 gallons a day of reclaimed water from the Colorado River through local utilities. But the local utilities have denied there is a water agreement, and the five states that receive Colorado River water are already fighting over who should reduce their share of the over-allocated waterway. 

In New Mexico, the developers of the $165 billion Project Jupiter data center disclosed its estimated water use less than two weeks before a county vote, proposing that the local utility would provide up to 60,000 gallons a day. But that utility already has experienced problems with arsenic contaminating drinking water, and that part of New Mexico is preparing to fallow thousands of acres of farmland to comply with a court settlement. 

Both projects are being challenged in court, underscoring a growing mistrust of data center developers. 

Bills introduced in California and Virginia have proposed requiring water use disclosures. The California bill by Assembly Member Diane Papan, D-San Mateo, was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a tech enthusiast, who expressed reluctance about imposing requirements without understanding their full impact. The legislation is expected to be reintroduced this year.

In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs recently offered another approach that could be a model for other areas: a water usage fee paid by data centers. 

In Phoenix, data centers consume roughly 177 million gallons of water a day — about 1.4% of the Colorado River’s average daily flow at Lees Ferry, Ariz., and 22.2% of Maricopa County’s daily water use. Hobbs proposed using the data center water fee to create a new Colorado River Protection Fund to help respond to imminent Colorado River cuts.

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

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So far, local and state leaders are playing catch-up to the richest tech companies in the world. To help level the playing field, it’s time for a new coalition to align governments, major AI companies, utilities and environmental groups to accelerate an option of water-sustainable data center practices. 

AI may be here to stay, so we should insist that data centers be built where and how it makes sense for water security and community health. The tech industry should apply its unique capacity for innovation to make data centers more sustainable and take a new approach to development based on community needs and priorities — rather than deepening a water crisis in arid regions.

Ann Hayden is vice president of climate resilient water systems at Environmental Defense Fund.

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