When it comes to overall water use, AI data is a drop in the bucket

Think globally, worry locally

While there is no risk of large tech companies draining seawater to use their LLM storage facilities, even smaller data centers can have a significant impact on nearby waters. One Meta data center in Newton County, Georgia, for example, is using about 10 percent of the county’s total water, according to The New York Times reports since last year. It is the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River in the near future that data centers take up 8 percent of the region’s water, a rate that could rise to 29 percent by 2050 if the largest number of data centers in northern Virginia it’s still going on.

Such sustainable use of water can end create challenges for the local economy and water, and it has led to one problem where the data center they took millions of gallons from local communities without paying. Local effects can be particularly severe in water-stressed areas; a 2025 Business Insider report found that 40 percent of planned and existing data centers in the US are located in areas with “high” or “very high” water scarcity, such as evaluated by the World Resources Institute.

With this in mind, major technology companies are eager to project an image of efficiency and stewardship in the water supply. Amazon he says has been allowing data centers to run faster to use less water for cooling, which helps them use less water per kilowatt-hour than other major data providers. Amazon said it was funding “50 water projects that are expected to return more than 5.8 billion gallons of water a year to local communities,” and Google released it. he laid down 165 water management services that he says “expected to fill more than 19 billion liters of water per year by 2030.”

If all the memes and concerns about water use in the data center help to drive this kind of environmental responsibility among the big PR companies that are focused on it, that’s all good. But if your concerned friend is starting to worry about AI data centers causing a global water disaster, the actual numbers involved should ease those worries.