A Black Swan Hovering Over the West’s Water Supply
“Whiskey is for drinking and water is worth fighting for.”
—Mark Twain
Although California state water officials are brimming with a rare calm contentment over the Sierra snowpack at 100 percent and a record amount of water banked in reservoirs and underground storage, a black swan hovering over this complacency is the amount of precious water being consumed by the rapid expansion of Data Centers, not only in California but also in other drought-stricken states in the West.
Data Centers are the digital hubs that keep us connected via email; allow us access to popular apps like Waze or AXS for buying sports and entertainment tickets; store our files on a cloud; transport us to websites or power the tsunami of AI and AI agents. All of these Data Centers are drawing down millions of gallons of water from municipal or regional water supplies for their cooling towers, chillers, pumps, pipes, condensers and computer room air handler units.
For example, research from the University of California, Riverside reveals that Open AI’s ChatGPT requires three 16.9-oz. water bottles to simply generate a 100-word email. With every email; every search; every app and every download to a cloud, fresh water is keeping us all connected by cooling the spider webs of wires in our digitized economy.
According to a tracker site called Data Center Map, there are now 312 Data Centers in California with an average size of 244 acres. There are basically two types: Hyperscale Data Centers offering cloud and internet services with each one using 200+ million gallons annually and Wholesale and Retail Data Centers using 6.5 millions gallons annually. (These figures do not include the water needed to generate the electricity to run these facilities 24/7.)
A looming threat — to households, agriculture and the proliferation of Data Centers — is that some of this heavy demand for water is flowing down from the Colorado River which is released from Lake Mead outside Las Vegas. Currently Lake Mead is only at 31% of capacity or 1,055 feet deep. If it continues to drop to 895 feet, it will hit “dead pool” meaning water won’t flow into California and perennially parched Arizona.
To their credit, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Meta Platforms have all pledged to be “water positive” by 2030. Through recirculation, reuse and other water-saving devices, they are conserving some of this finite commodity when and where they can. But who’s going to see if they make good on their commitments to save water that’s only going to be even scarcer over the next five years while more Hyperscalers and nascent AI companies are also scaling up their server farms and will be lining up at the trough?
Peak Water is here — and with this black swan of Data Centers needing more water to keep their profits flowing — hopefully our water administrators in the seven states drawing water from the Colorado River will fully embrace the real potential of Mark Twain’s admonition some 160 years ago and fast track a holistic approach so that 40 million residents and small and industrial farmers won’t be at the short end of the water pipe.
Formerly the Managing Director in the West for the New York-based Ad Council, John T. Boal is a co-author of Chicken Soup for the Volunteer’s Soul, a scriptwriter and an independent journalist covering environmental issues and solutions.