Meta · New York · The Atlantic Technology
The Truth About AI’s Water Deploy
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There are two competing schools of thought over how water-intensive AI is.
Key facts
- But the downside, the cost they have to pay,” is using more electricity—10 to 65 percent more, by various estimates
- In 2024, Meta’s “indirect” water consumption—referring to the water used during power generation—was 19 billion gallons
- In 2023, data centers used slightly more than 17 billion gallons of water for cooling, as much as about half a million Americans collectively use in a year
- From the April 2026 issue: Inside the dirty, dystopian world of AI data centers
Summary
Updated at 3:41 p.m. The other school, populated by Silicon Valley types, holds that “The Data Center Water Crisis Isn’t Real,” as an article in the right-wing publication Pirate Wires argued in December. As with so many debates around AI, the arguments are not always presented in good faith. “We don’t have the real ground-truth numbers on data-center water use to put everyone on the same page,” Eric Masanet, a sustainability researcher at UC Santa Barbara who studies data centers, told me. Yet the water issue is tremendously consequential—not only for the well-being of residents in all of the counties where new data centers are popping up but also for the future development and regulation of AI itself.