Data centers consumed 264B gallons of water as drought hits nearly 63% of US
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Americans across multiple states are being urged to conserve water as drought conditions intensify, reservoirs shrink, and utilities issue increasingly urgent warnings. At the same time, a different kind of consumer is quietly demanding unprecedented amounts of water: artificial intelligence .
The collision between worsening drought and the AI boom is raising alarms among environmental experts, utility operators, and local governments as hyperscale data centers consume hundreds of millions of gallons of water to cool the servers powering chatbots, image generators, and AI search tools.
According to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, nearly 1 trillion liters of water were consumed by AI data centers in 2025. That amounts to roughly 264 billion gallons for the year, or the annual water usage of 1.8 million Americans. AI data centers are currently consuming 550 million gallons of water per day. That’s roughly the same rate of water consumption as the entirety of the world’s bottled water industry.
Now, with drought conditions spreading across large portions of the country , questions are mounting about whether communities can sustain both.
While most people associate AI with cloud computing and advanced software, the technology relies on enormous physical infrastructure.