I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption

Brian Potter · 30 Aug 2025

A change of mind in this piece

American data centres consume about 66 million gallons of water a day, a small fraction of what they withdraw.

No longer holdsSo to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption.

Read the piece on construction-physics.com ↗

2 korrents from this piece · 1 of them a turn ↓

Brian Potter did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
American data centres consume about 66 million gallons of water a day, a small fraction of what they withdraw.

No longer holdsSo to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption.

Their words nowBut I didn’t read the report closely enough, and apparently this 579 million gallons a day was in fact consumptive use.
Our reading
The published estimates of data-centre water consumption rest on accounting choices that push the number as high as it will go.

Their wordsHowever, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption.

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