The race to build AI infrastructure has a thirst problem, and Congress is starting to notice. On September 3, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on the draft Water Cost Accountability Act, a piece of legislation designed to keep local communities from subsidizing the enormous water demands of data centers cooling racks of GPUs around the clock.
What the bill actually does
The Water Cost Accountability Act would bar public water systems from passing along the costs of water infrastructure expansions driven by data center operations to regular customers. Instead, the financial burden would fall squarely on the data center operators themselves.
The legislation would also direct the EPA to report on water sources used by “qualified data centers,” defined as facilities averaging more than 200,000 gallons of water per day.
Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie framed the hearing around accountability, noting that while data centers currently consume a relatively small fraction of water compared to other industrial users, the trajectory matters more than the snapshot. He acknowledged that technological improvements are reducing per-unit water consumption, but the sheer scale of planned AI infrastructure threatens to overwhelm those efficiency gains.
