The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Forbes want you to think AI data centers are draining America’s water supply. Liberal senators like Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Ed Markey (D-Mass) have piled on, writing a letter to administration officials criticizing data centers in part for their “increasing burdens on water supplies.”
This isn’t idle chatter. Fearmongering about water use has led Denver to consider banning new data centers, Senator Sanders to support a nationwide moratorium on them, and Colorado’s state legislature to propose requiring all data centers to run entirely on renewable energy (never mind that they need non-intermittent energy).
I don’t say this lightly: it’s nonsense. In a new paper, we at the America First Policy Institute looked at the data—and found that the water use scare is really a hoax. Data centers pose no threat to water prices or availability. As one expert has said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that data centers have not raised household water bills at all, anywhere.” On net, they actually benefit consumers and local communities.
The Trump administration knows it. On March 4th, President Trump convened the country’s largest data center operators. They pledged to “pay their own way” for power and to protect consumer electricity rates. That pledge is a leap toward American energy abundance and an AI boom that benefits the American worker. But it’s also a declaration: America doesn’t fight fake battles anymore.
How could the mainstream narrative be so wrong? None of the critics thought to look at any quantitative facts. I’ll give them to you.
The total water use of all American data centers is somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5 percent of American freshwater consumption. That’s not much. In fact, every year the US loses at least fifteen times more water to leaky pipes than to all data centers combined.
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Even the largest single data centers aren’t very consumptive. Colossus I, for example, was the largest data center of 2024, yet it consumed less water in a year than three square miles of farmland does. There are 1.3 million square miles of farmland in the US.
The industry analysis firm SemiAnalysis considered its larger successor, Colossus II. They found that it uses about as much water each year as 2.5 In-N-Out restaurants. Perhaps the mainstream media is similarly outraged by the water stress that new burger joint franchises place on local communities? Not likely.
You might think data centers are geographically concentrated such that national impacts are small, but local impacts can be large. That’s false, too.
Take Maricopa County, Arizona, for example—one of the most “water-stressed” counties in America. Maricopa’s data centers consume over 30 times less water each year than its golf courses do. Yet the data centers are so much more profitable that they generate “50 [times] as much tax revenue per unit of water used” as the golf courses.
In reality, data centers are a boon for local communities and for our country. When data centers move in, they often finance upgrades to local water systems and create economies of scale, lowering costs for households (and will do so for electricity now, thanks to President Trump). Elon Musk’s xAI, for example, built a water treatment plant next to its Colossus II data center that will make it a net-zero water user.
The AI data center boom has also benefited the American worker. It has directly raised construction workers’ wages by 30 percent and created tremendous job growth in the trades. McKinsey estimates that each data center industry job creates an additional 3.5 jobs “in the surrounding economy.” Hard-working Americans are doing better than ever under Trump’s AI dominance policies.
Data centers cement America’s national power, too. All signs suggest that strength in the 21st century will hinge on a nation’s power in artificial intelligence. With the most chips, the biggest data centers, and the best models, we will project peace through strength again. In more ways than one, President Trump is forging the next Pax Americana.
The water use hoax teaches us to be vigilant. Media outlets with an axe to grind and lawmakers with special interests are eager to make careers out of dishonesty and manufactured outrage. Water use is not the first or the final excuse they will find to criticize America First policies. But it’s certainly among the least convincing.
Yusuf Mahmood serves as policy director for AI and Emerging Technology at the America First Policy Institute.
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