There’s a strange comfort in knowing that the water in my glass is the same water that once coursed through a dinosaur’s veins. Earth’s water doesn’t vanish, it cycles. It evaporates, it condenses, it flows. Finite, but renewable. That’s what school teaches us, the water cycle. Supposed to feel hopeful.
Then I found out that every time I ping a chatbot, every session with AI, every click in the cloud, it uses water. Not a trickle. Billions of gallons are being evaporated in data centers around the world. And when reports warn “once it’s gone, it’s gone,” that doesn’t mean the water is destroyed. It means it’s gone from here. Gone from the local communities that needed it most in that moment.
The Problem: Local Water, Global Extraction
Tech giants build data centers where electricity is cheap, water is unregulated, and pushback is weak. These places are often already experiencing water stress like rural counties, drought-prone states, and economically vulnerable areas.
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One Microsoft campus in Texas used over 235 million gallons of water in a single year. Some was recycled, but over 39 million gallons of it was potable drinking water.
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By 2027, global data infrastructure (including AI) could withdraw 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic meters of water annually. That’s more than half the UK’s total yearly water use.
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A single large data center (about 100 megawatts) can use around 2 million liters of water per day — the equivalent of what 6,500 households would use.
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Over 40% of U.S. data centers are located in regions with already high water stress.
These are real communities, real ecosystems, and real futures being dried out by invisible tech infrastructure. All so the cloud can keep growing.
All Water Problems Are Local
Charles Fishman said it clearly in The Big Thirst:
“All water problems are local.”
A crisis in one region doesn’t magically ripple outward to fix itself. It’s the people in that place who suffer, and it’s the people in that place who must be part of the solution. That’s not just true for water. That’s true for everything.
We keep thinking in national headlines, viral posts, and global abstractions. The truth is, change starts where your feet are.
A strong community is like a wall of bricks. Each of us a piece, locking into place with the people around us. A single brick can be kicked over. A wall of bricks can withstand earthquakes.
That’s what “local” means. It means us. It means the block you live on, the water in your town’s pipes, the neighbors you wave to — or avoid — at the grocery store.
When water problems are solved locally, they build resilience in ways no top-down rescue ever could. The same is true for housing, food, safety, education. If we focus inward, we strengthen the us. And the stronger the us, the harder it is for outside forces — corporate extraction, government neglect, climate disaster — to break us.
Start there. Start small. Start with us.
The Real Issue Isn’t AI. It’s How It’s Built.
You using AI isn’t the ultimate problem.
And here’s the part most people miss the amount of water tied to one person’s AI use is minuscule compared to the full workload of these data centers.
Not just AI. Email. Streaming. Backups. Banking. Gaming. Government servers. The whole cloud eats water.
The enemy isn’t “the chatbot.” But he's definitely a villain. The enemy is unchecked, unregulated, opaque corporate infrastructure like data centers designed to consume as much as they need, wherever they want, with zero obligation to the communities whose water they drain.
Boycotting AI as a personal protest might feel principled, but it’s a drop in the bucket. That’s not me saying individual choices don’t matter. Sometimes they do. But here, the scale is so wildly skewed that abstaining from AI alone won’t move the needle while the rest of the workload keeps burning through resources.
The better question isn’t “Should we use AI?” but “Why are these data centers allowed to operate like this in the first place?”
Because the truth is, we do need this infrastructure. I like AI. I want to use it. It has benefits -real ones - for education, accessibility, creativity, problem-solving. But I want it to be run on ethical, transparent, and sustainable systems.
That means designing data centers with better cooling technology. Powering them with renewables. Decentralizing them so local communities have a say. Making water usage a public record, not a corporate secret.
That’s where the conversation belongs. Not on guilt-tripping people who use the tools, but on demanding better infrastructure for the tools to run on. And that’s a much bigger conversation because failing infrastructure has been the beginning of the end for every empire in history. Not just the bridges and roads you can see, but the water grids, the electrical networks, the invisible systems holding the whole thing together.
It’s a tangled ball of wires and headphone cords, and it’s overwhelming to look at all at once. So you find a single thread and you start pulling. For me, that thread is water. For you, it might be housing, or food systems, or local energy grids. Whatever it is, the work starts small.
Start local. Start now.
Questions We Should Be Asking
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Why are data centers being approved in drought zones with no public water reporting?
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Why isn’t water usage forecasted the way electricity is?
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Why are communities excluded from decisions about local resources?
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Why don’t we have a Digital Bill of Rights to protect our ecosystems and our attention spans from being treated as infinite?
We have the tech. We have the brains. What we don’t have is a system that values people over profit.
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