The first data center controversy I remember hearing about was when the National Security Agency (NSA) and Facebook both built in Utah, where I was born and raised. No one wants an NSA data center in their backyard, and in a state starved for housing, it seemed silly to give up so much land to faceless buildings.
I don’t remember much wailing about water usage when those two data centers were built. Things are different today, though. Utah just announced it would welcome the nation’s largest data center to rural Millard County, 134 miles south of Salt Lake City.
This is some of Utah’s most arid landscape. Most of the land is used for agriculture, and Millard County commissioners had to approve a zoning change to allow for over 1,100 acres of agricultural land to be used for heavy industrial development.
Just before that announcement, officials in Wyoming (where I currently live) announced an AI data center is coming to the state capital in Cheyenne. Once complete, this data center will use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined.
County commissioners and other government officials tout the economic benefits of these projects, and they’re nothing to sneeze at. The project in Utah is estimated to bring in as much $40 billion. But everyone tends to overlook one aspect of data centers that elected officials and developers don’t want to address.
Millions of gallons of water
Data centers don’t just gobble up power (often requiring grid updates, the cost of which often get passed onto residential customers). They’re thirsty as sin.
The NSA data center in Utah uses 128 million gallons of water per year to cool its servers. That’s enough water to support 1,168 homes per year (assuming the average of 300 gallons used per American home per day). That’s enough water for 3,656 people for an entire year. That’s about how many people live in my small Wyoming town, and the next-closest community.
Facebook’s Utah data center isn’t as thirsty, only pulling about 13.5 million gallons per year. There are no official numbers on how much water the new data centers in Millard County or Cheyenne might consume.
But this underscores a growing problem, especially as data centers look to expand in the West, where we have an abundance of land and cold winters that make cooling off servers more energy-efficient: at what point will we run out of water?
Just three years ago, Utah had one of its best winters in recorded history. 903 inches of snow fell at Alta Ski Resort, a record for any ski area in Utah. During the 2023-24 winter, Alta got another 628 inches of snow, good for 1,531 inches over two years.
Despite all that snow, 100% of Utah is in either a moderate or severe drought status. Now, I’m not naiive enough to think Utah should have somehow “saved” snowmelt from two years ago; however, when you look at how historic those two winters were, and at last winter’s relatively normal snowfall, it’s alarming that the state is back in drought.
And Utah isn’t alone. 49% of Wyoming is in moderate to severe drought, and 66% of all Western states are in some form of drought (including all of Idaho and Arizona).
Dry soil, bad runoff
All this drought dries out the soil, which then soaks up more runoff water during spring, preventing it from flowing into rivers, streams, lakes, and reservoirs. So, recharging the West’s water supply isn’t just about a couple of good winters, as we saw in Utah. There’s more than just a bad winter at play here.
Our fisheries are feeling the impacts, as we’ve seen hoot-owl restrictions come down earlier and earlier each year. A couple of my favorite rivers are flowing abnormally low this year, after doing alright last summer. I had to quit fishing a few other waters before July this year, because they were too low and warm for safe angling.
It’s wise to question the validity of data centers in the West, especially in our current drought state. At some point, we’ll run out of water, right? Not just for our rivers, but for our homes.
The only question is if we’ll cut off the data center development before that happens.
I understand our lives are built around this type of infrastructure. I understand the need for these server farms. But there’s got to be a better place to build them (and a better way to cool them, too).
Thank you so much for talking about things so many people don’t want to talk about. As fishermen, we are thoroughly reliant on water for our pastime. And we need that water to be clean and abundant. But because we live in the time of global warming, it’s a resource that has become more scarce in many places. We need to practice mindfulness as a culture, which is not a compatible value with “growth” for growth’s sake. Hard choices are going to be made, or Mother Nature will make them for us.