The tech giants spending billions of dollars on them say the water part, at least, is solvable. Data centers are the warehouses full of computer servers that run the internet and increasingly artificial intelligence.
The computers get hot, and keeping them cool takes water. American chip giant Nvidia said in a June report that it can eliminate water consumption almost entirely at some facilities when deploying DSX, its newest system for designing and managing AI data centers.
It's a bold claim, and one the industry is under mounting pressure to make good on.
In 2025, data centers consumed 222 billion liters (59 billion gallons) of water worldwide for cooling, according to consultancy Rystad Energy.
Inside a data center. Photo by Unsplash/Valentin Lacoste
