A Guardian analysis of data from Cleanview and the federal government found that 517 of 809 planned datacenters, roughly 64%, are located in areas that have been in drought conditions over the past year. A similar proportion of existing datacenters are already situated in drought-affected areas, the analysis showed. The projects are concentrated in the western and southeastern US, where a severe lack of rain and snow has desiccated croplands and heightened fears of a disastrous wildfire season.
Scientists have determined that the climate crisis, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, is worsening the duration and intensity of droughts in the US. The US Drought Monitor currently rates more than 60% of the contiguous US at varying stages of drought, the largest spring expanse in modern records.
Large datacenters, some the size of small towns, require up to 5 million gallons of water a day for cooling, equivalent to the daily water use of up to 50,000 people, according to researchers. Overall, the multiplying datacenters across the US are set to demand as much as 73 billion gallons of water a year by 2028, up from about 17 billion gallons in 2023. Each 100-word AI prompt uses roughly one 500ml bottle of water due to the cooling needs of datacenters, researchers have estimated.
“The AI industry is sprinting as fast as it can to gain market dominance, and the rest of us have to deal with a great increase in water demand in places already in drought,” said Christopher Dalbom, an expert in water resources law at Tulane University. “Even if there wasn’t climate change, we’d be feeling the effects of droughts more acutely, because water demand is going up and up, to feed more people and water more lawns and crops. There isn’t enough water to go around. Now with this explosion of datacenters, I think a crunch point is inevitable.”
Companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are pouring billions of dollars into new datacenters, with developers often drawn to dry, sparsely populated areas due to lower land costs and generous tax breaks. Arid climates are also thought to cause the least corrosion to equipment over time.
One of the world’s largest datacenters, a complex twice the size of Manhattan, was approved last month in Box Elder County, Utah, which has been deep in drought since summer 2025. The Stratos Project, backed by Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary, is planned to span roughly 40,000 acres and use up to 9 gigawatts of power. In Washington, Walla Walla County, site of a planned Amazon datacenter, has also been overwhelmingly in drought since July 2025. In Texas, two large new datacenters are arriving in Pecos County and Carson County, recently parched by drought. Researchers have calculated that datacenters could account for 9% of Texas’s total water use by 2040.
Local opposition to datacenter projects has grown, causing some developments to be curtailed or canceled. The concerns have become a political headache for Republicans — President Donald Trump has been a vocal supporter of the AI industry — with much of the opposition coming from rural, more conservative areas.
“Ranchers are being told to be conservative with water, to not waste water, and now there’s a new competing interest able to get near unlimited access to water,” said Andrew Coppin, chief executive of Ranchbot, a company that helps ranchers track water use. “The concerns from farmers are real and justified. Datacenters are flavor of the month now, but we wouldn’t make the choice to only be able to have a shower on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.”
Datacenter developers say the industry’s current water use remains a fraction of what larger consumers, primarily agriculture, already take, causing growing strain on key sources such as the Colorado River. Even the irrigation of golf courses and lawns consumes more water than datacenters, they said.
“Datacenter operators work closely with local authorities to ensure compliance with all applicable rules and regulations and to ensure operations do not stress local water supplies,” said Dan Diorio, vice-president of state policy at the Data Center Coalition. “The industry is actively prioritizing responsible water use through operational best practices and innovative development strategies.”
The sector says it is making progress in replacing standard evaporative cooling with more efficient technologies such as closed-loop cooling, where the same coolant is continually piped among servers to absorb heat. However, such cooling systems require more energy to run, typically from fossil fuels, which themselves need large amounts of water to generate electricity.
Meta’s proposed Hyperion datacenter in Louisiana will use closed-loop cooling but will require the energy input of 10 gas-fired power plants that will use large amounts of water and emit planet-heating emissions, the company said. Meta said it will prioritize on-site water efficiency to the extent that its water use will be less than if the land were used for agricultural purposes. “Meta estimates the datacenter will use as much as 1 billion gallons of water per year, drawing it from an aquifer currently used for agriculture, not from the community’s drinking water,” a company spokeswoman said.
In Utah, the Stratos Project has drawn particularly fierce opposition. A group opposing the county approval is aiming to overturn the decision via a public referendum, and five local residents and a progressive group have filed a lawsuit. O’Leary has accused opponents, without evidence, of being paid protesters or in league with the Chinese Communist party.
“There could not be a worse advocate for this project than Kevin O’Leary, who has been absolutely dismissive of people in Utah again and again,” said Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University and executive director of the environmental group Grow the Flow. “I haven’t found a single person in favor of this. It has brought together urban and rural communities, farmers and environmentalists, linking arms against this. I think this project is mortally wounded as a result.”
Abbott said the Great Salt Lake is “headed for an all-time low” and that Stratos’s massive energy and cooling water needs will likely push the ecosystem into further water deficit. “There couldn’t be a worse time to do this,” he said. “Climate change is causing important hydrological shifts and here in the west we have a less stable water supply due to the mega-drought. But, more importantly, we are also harvesting the fruits of a century of water overuse.”
The overall water impact of AI extends far beyond datacenters themselves. A January study by Xylem found that datacenters will be responsible for just 4% of the 30 trillion gallons of extra water that will be needed globally for AI expansion by mid-century, with power generation and semiconductor fabrication consuming far more.
“Datacenters are the most visible element to people but they are only part of the picture,” said Albert Cho, chief strategy officer at Xylem. Cho said datacenters’ water use will remain smaller than agriculture and that renewable energy and reduced water waste will help reduce demand. “I think there is an emerging consensus among the major hyper-scalers about the importance of water stewardship,” he said.
Public backlash has been strong enough that some states are considering new restrictions. A poll found 70% of Americans do not want to live next to a datacenter. California, Michigan and Iowa are mulling bills requiring operators to submit regular reports on water use; South Carolina and Kansas may force developers to use closed-loop cooling; and New York lawmakers have proposed an outright moratorium on datacenters.
Worldwide, the United Nations has estimated that three-quarters of people could face drought impacts by 2050, while datacenters will use 9.3 trillion liters of water in the coming decade, enough to meet the drinking water needs of the planet’s human population for over a year. “Large-scale withdrawals can strain aquifers and river systems, particularly in arid or groundwater-depleted regions,” a recent UN report warned.
“We need to rethink our relationship with water because at the moment there is just this unrestricted demand everywhere,” Abbott said. “We are in systemic water deficit almost everywhere on the planet.”