A Kansas Health Institute report puts hard numbers on something water utilities have been saying quietly for two years. U.S. data center water consumption could quadruple by 2028. Electricity use could more than double by 2030.
The report’s framing is worth quoting because it’s unusually direct about the politics. State policy responses, the authors write, reflect a tension between economic development interests and local community health and environmental concerns. Which is a careful way of saying the incentives are pulling in opposite directions and nobody has resolved it.
Cooling choice is the water number
A data center’s water draw depends almost entirely on how it rejects heat. Evaporative cooling is cheap, efficient and thirsty. Closed-loop and air-cooled systems use far less water and considerably more electricity, which raises the power number and the operating cost.
So the two projections in the report aren’t independent. Operators trade one against the other, and until recently they optimized for power because water was cheap and unregulated in most jurisdictions. That’s changing where aquifers are stressed.
Liquid-cooled racks complicate the picture again. Direct-to-chip cooling is a closed loop and doesn’t consume water the way an evaporative tower does, but the higher rack densities driving AI deployments concentrate heat rejection loads in ways that make the facility-level design harder, not easier.
Siting is now a water question
Grid interconnection has been the binding constraint on data center siting for three years. Water is catching up.
Campuses like Meta’s Hyperion development in Richland Parish, Louisiana land in places chosen for power availability and land cost. Water gets evaluated later, and by then the incentives are signed and the community conversation has already started.
Towns have begun voting to pause data center approvals, and the pattern has moved beyond a handful of outliers. Contractors bidding this work now face a real probability that an approved project stalls in front of a local board.
What it means for design and construction teams
Expect cooling system selection to move earlier in the process and to get argued in public. Expect water reuse and greywater infrastructure to show up as scope on projects that wouldn’t have carried it two years ago. Expect utility agreements to include consumption caps.
None of that slows the pipeline much. Google alone raised capital expenditure guidance to $205 billion this month. It does mean the mechanical package on these jobs is becoming the politically sensitive part of the design, which is a genuinely new condition for the people specifying it.