Require Comprehensive Accounting of Projected Water Usage

Applications must include the data center’s projected water usage. Applicants must be required to account for all water uses, including water used in data center construction, server cooling, facility cooling (including cooling towers), and other ancillary water uses. Most data center projections currently do not account for the water facilities will use to cool their infrastructure (including server cooling and facility cooling), which consumes a significant amount of water,1 as well as construction.

example

Illinois proposed SB 2181, requiring annual water consumption reporting for data centers broken out by month. The bill specifically calls out that water used for cooling must be included. (“‘Water consumption’ means the total amount of water consumed by a data center, including water used for cooling, measured in gallons.”)

Weak Example

California AB 93 (signed into law) mandates that new data centers must provide an estimate of their expected water use when applying for a city or county license. However, the legislation does not specify that all water uses must be included in this report, creating a loophole to exclude water used for cooling, construction, or other ancillary use cases.

  1. Pengfei Li et al., “Making AI Less ‘Thirsty’: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models,” arXiv, March 26, 2025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271. ↩︎