Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of the AI Boom

By Jon Gorey, October 17, 2025

In states and counties across the US, lawmakers aren’t just opening the door for these metaphorical, mechanical monsters. They’re actively luring them in, with tax breaks and other incentives, eager to lay claim to new municipal revenues and a piece of the explosive growth surrounding artificial intelligence.

That may sound hyperbolic, but data centers truly are resource-ravenous. Even a mid-sized data center consumes as much water as a small town, while larger ones require up to 5 million gallons of water every day—as much as a city of 50,000 people.

Powering and cooling their rows of server stacks also takes an astonishing amount of electricity. A conventional data center—think cloud storage for your work documents or streaming videos—draws as much electricity as 10,000 to 25,000 households, according to the International Energy Agency. But a newer, AI-focused “hyperscale” data center can use as much power as 100,000 homes or more. Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana, for example, is expected to draw more than twice the power of the entire city of New Orleans once completed. Another Meta data center planned in Wyoming will use more electricity than every home in the state combined.

The warm water-cooling system at a Sandia Labs data center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The data center earned LEED Gold certification for efficiency in 2020. Credit: Bret Latter/Sandia Labs via Flickr CC.

A 2023 study by the University of California Riverside estimated that an AI chat session of 20 or so queries uses up to a bottle of freshwater. That amount can vary depending on the platform, with more sophisticated models demanding larger volumes of water, while other estimates suggest it could be closer to a few spoonfuls per query.

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