SpaceX on Monday amended its initial public offering to state that water conditions – including water scarcity, water regulations and drought – could limit data center development.
It’s not the only tech company trying to assess how water scarcity might impact its business. Water consumption is becoming one of the most controversial issues in data centers. Recent Gallup vote found that seven in ten Americans oppose data center development, and water scarcity is ranked as the top resource issue. In the face of increasingly fierce resistance, some tech companies are trying to assure the public that they must confront this problem.
Data centers mainly employ water to frosty server racks, which produce enormous amounts of heat. One popular technique, known as evaporative cooling, uses fresh water to absorb heat, which is then pumped to cooling towers where it evaporates to the outside.
Using more water could save money and reduce emissions for huge technology companies by reducing the power needed for cooling, which relies on energy-intensive pumps to recirculate water. But it can also come with a huge water footprint: for example, Google’s facility in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which uses evaporative cooling, digested over 1 billion gallons in 2024
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory predicted a 2024 report found that hyperscale data centers could employ up to 33 billion gallons of water by 2030 if they relied heavily on evaporative cooling. That’s the same as, or even less than, other thirsty industries like agriculture and oil and gas well fragged can employ 1.5 to 16 million gallons of water, but that poses a risk in regions where water is already limited. The risk is particularly acute in summer, when data center cooling demand surges at the same time as municipal water employ.
“Water is a highly local and regional issue,” says Shaolei Ren, an engineering professor at the University of California, Riverside. “It’s a limited resource and we have to manage it very carefully.”
Some tech giants, including Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle, have released statements in recent months indicating they are moving away from evaporative cooling entirely to save water. This includes the massive expansion of OpenAI and Oracle Stargate in multiple states, including the water-stressed Texas region.
These include commitments to replenish more freshwater than the company uses by investing in local water projects; increasing the scale of employ of recovered and recycled water; and disclosing annual water consumption in data centers. (Other tech companies, including Microsoft, are making similar promises about water replenishment and local investment. Google has been working on most of these promises for several years.) It also promises to employ a “data-driven framework” to decide which data center designs will work best in local catchments.
Ben Townsend, global head of infrastructure and sustainability at Google, says data center design is much more complicated than simply abandoning one type of cooling across the board. It said the company has been conducting detailed hydrological assessments of its locations over the past four years to determine what type of cooling would be best.
“In some regions there is little water, in others there is plenty of it,” he says. “A one-size-fits-all strategy just doesn’t work.”
In April, Google defended Evaporative cooling for areas with so-called “abundance” of water reported to the European Union as necessary for the development of truly sustainable data centers. Google’s arguments dovetail with recent research by Ren and his team, who found that if all U.S. data centers used some type of evaporative cooling during peak demand, it could free up an additional 10 to 30 gigawatts of power. In areas where networks are stressed but water supplies are not, the employ of evaporative cooling can provide significant headroom for utilities trying to balance the load.