US Data Centers Could Require as Much Water as New York City by 2030, Study Shows

All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Gizmodo may earn an affiliate commission. AI is incredibly thirsty. The data centers that run these models already use massive amounts of water, and by 2030, those in the U.S. could require enough additional water capacity to rival New York City’s daily supply. That’s according to a new study led by Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. The findings—which have not yet been peer reviewed but are publicly available on the preprint server arXiv—show that limited public water capacity is emerging as a critical bottleneck to data center growth. To avoid burdening local ratepayers, tech companies are partnering with communities to fund water infrastructure upgrades, often spending hundreds of millions of dollars. “Those companies are profit driven, right? So I think clearly there is something wrong,” Ren told Gizmodo. Data centers operate continuously, generating lots of heat from dense concentrations of servers, networking equipment, and other forms of IT infrastructure. Liquid c