Trockenste Periode seit 1895. KI wird nicht aufhören zu trinken.

Key Takeaways

• Record Drought, Record Demand: The Southeast is in its worst drought since records began in 1895, with 97% of the region parched, yet data centers are still being built there, consuming millions of gallons daily
• The Water Vanishes: Data center evaporative cooling removes water from local watersheds permanently. It vaporizes into the atmosphere and never returns to the rivers, aquifers, or sewers it came from
• Communities Fighting Back: Fourteen states have passed moratoriums on data center development, and over 230 environmental groups have called for a national freeze
• The Fix Exists, but Only for New Builds: Zero-water cooling technology works, but the vast majority of existing and currently approved data centers still use evaporative systems

The Taps That Went Dry

Beverly and Jeff Morris live in Newton County, Georgia, less than 400 yards from a Meta data center. When Meta started building in 2018, their water began to disappear. Years later, two of their bathroom taps still do not work. The water that remains comes out as gritty sludge, littered with sediments.

They have spent $5,000 trying to fix the problem. Replacing their well would cost $25,000, money they do not have.

The Meta facility next door consumes roughly 500,000 gallons of water per day, about 10% of the entire county’s daily water supply, according to Mike Hopkins, executive director of the Newton County Water and Sewerage Authority. The county is on track for a water deficit by 2030. Water rates are expected to surge 33%. Fixing the infrastructure will cost more than $250 million, and Hopkins describes it as a “race against the clock.”

Newton County is not an outlier. It is a preview.

Where the Water Goes

Most people imagine data centers as sleek, digital operations. The “cloud” suggests something weightless and ethereal. The physical reality is a concrete building the size of several football fields, packed with thousands of servers generating enormous heat. That heat has to go somewhere.

The dominant cooling method is evaporative cooling. Water is pumped through cooling towers and evaporated to draw heat away from the servers. The process is efficient and cheap. It is also destructive.

“Water is going into the facility and not coming out, not going back to the sewer, not going back to the river,” said Ed Buchan, Assistant Director of Raleigh Water. “It’s just gone. Vaporized into the air.”

Unlike a factory or a farm, which returns most of its water to local systems through runoff or wastewater treatment, evaporative cooling removes water from the hydrological cycle entirely. It is consumed in the physical sense: converted from liquid to vapor and dispersed into the atmosphere. For the local watershed, every gallon that enters a data center cooling tower is a gallon that never comes back.

A typical hyperscale data center using evaporative cooling can consume three to five million gallons per day. A large facility can match the water consumption of a town with 10,000 to 50,000 residents.

The Scale of the Thirst

The numbers at the national level are staggering.

In 2023, Google’s global operations consumed 6.4 billion gallons of water, with 95% used by data centers. A single Google facility in Council Bluffs, Iowa consumed one billion gallons in 2024, the highest of any Google data center.

Meta consumed 813 million gallons globally in 2023, with 95% (roughly 776 million gallons) going to data center cooling.

Northern Virginia, the densest data center corridor on Earth, collectively withdrew close to two billion gallons in 2023, a 63% increase since 2019.

A federal study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) estimated that U.S. data centers consumed 17 billion gallons of water directly through cooling in 2023. By 2028, that figure could double or even quadruple.

These numbers are almost certainly undercounts. Microsoft, the second-largest cloud operator, provides data on overall water use but does not break it down by data center. Much of the industry’s water consumption is simply not publicly reported. A University of Illinois study flagged the transparency gap, particularly in the drought-prone Mountain West.

The Worst Drought Since Records Began

These billions of gallons are being consumed during the worst drought the Southeast has experienced since modern monitoring began.

As of April 14, 2026, 96.83% of the Southeast is in moderate to exceptional drought (D1-D4). 81.75% faces severe to exceptional drought (D2-D4). The entire region, all 100%, is in abnormally dry or worse conditions.

This is the largest area of drought for the Southeast since the U.S. Drought Monitor started tracking conditions in 2000.

The numbers are historic in a deeper sense, too. Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina experienced record dry conditions for the September 2025 to March 2026 period, with records dating back to 1895. Alabama ranked second driest for that period. Florida ranked third. Precipitation deficits date back to July 2025: nine straight months of below-normal rainfall across seven states.

In Raleigh, Falls Lake, the city’s primary drinking water source, has dropped below normal levels, and the city activated Stage 1 water-use restrictions. Meanwhile, a proposed data center in nearby Apex would have consumed one million gallons per day at peak demand. Community opposition paused the project.

The question is obvious: why are data centers still being approved in regions that are running out of water?

The answer is tax breaks, fiber infrastructure, and cheap land. The same factors that make the Southeast attractive for manufacturing (low costs, business-friendly regulation, available real estate) make it irresistible for data centers. The water cost is externalized onto the community.

The Moratorium Movement

Communities are starting to fight back, and the scale of the resistance is growing fast.

Cities and towns in at least 14 states have passed moratoriums on data center development, according to Tech Policy Press. Chatham County, North Carolina approved a one-year moratorium in April 2026, driven primarily by water concerns. “I think that is probably the single greatest concern,” said Commissioner Karen Howard, “weighed by the minds of our commissioners in deciding to pass the moratorium.”

Charlotte City Council member Dimple Ajmera has called for tighter controls on water and electricity consumption for incoming data center projects amid the ongoing drought. Denver proposed a yearlong moratorium in March 2026, reflecting a deeper regulatory vacuum: Colorado has no rules governing data center water use.

In Richmond County, North Carolina, residents are pushing back against Amazon’s 800-acre data center project. Many of them already deal with dry wells and poor water quality that forces them to rely on bottled water.

In December 2025, over 230 environmental and community groups sent a letter to Congress demanding a national moratorium on data center construction. Senator Bernie Sanders echoed the call.

Heather Somers, Director of the North Carolina Rural Water Association, put it plainly: “If we don’t get some reins in place, we’re going to be in trouble for sure.”

The Food and Water Watch projects that by 2028, data centers will require enough water to serve more than 18 million households. The energy demands are equally extreme — AI (Artificial Intelligence) is projected to consume as much electricity as 28 million U.S. households by the same year.

The Steelman: Why It Is Not That Simple

The industry’s counterarguments deserve serious engagement. Some of them are real.

Agriculture dwarfs data centers in total water consumption. Farming accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals, according to the United Nations, and data centers represent a fraction of total U.S. water use. At the national level, this is true. But at the local level, where a single facility consumes 10% of a county’s daily water, national averages are irrelevant. The Morris family does not live in a national average. They live in Newton County.

Zero-water cooling technology exists and works. Microsoft announced in December 2024 that all new data center designs would use next-generation cooling technology that consumes zero water for evaporative cooling. Pilot projects in Phoenix, Arizona and Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin are testing zero-water evaporative designs in 2026. Liquid immersion cooling and closed-loop systems can eliminate the need for evaporative water entirely by recirculating coolant without venting it.

This is genuinely good news, and genuinely insufficient. These technologies apply to new builds only. The thousands of existing data centers using evaporative cooling will continue to consume water for years or decades. And the data centers being proposed right now in drought-stricken North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia are not all using zero-water designs. The gap between what the industry can build and what it is actually building is where the crisis lives.

Data centers bring jobs and tax revenue. This is true. But communities are increasingly calculating whether the trade-off (a few hundred permanent jobs versus permanent drawdowns on their water supply, 33% rate hikes, and $250 million infrastructure bills) actually nets out in their favor.

The Owens Valley Rhyme

This is not the first time a powerful entity has drained a smaller community’s water supply to fuel its own growth.

In the early 1900s, the city of Los Angeles engineered the diversion of the Owens River, 233 miles away in a rural California valley, to feed the city’s explosive growth. Owens Valley farmers watched their water disappear. Orchards died. The local economy collapsed. Residents dynamited the aqueduct in protest. Los Angeles kept pumping. The lake that the river fed, Owens Lake, is now a dry, toxic lakebed that generates some of the worst dust pollution in the United States.

The parallel is not exact. Data centers are not Los Angeles, and water wells are not aqueducts. But the structural dynamic is strikingly similar: a wealthy, powerful entity extracts a finite resource from a less powerful community, externalizes the cost onto local residents, and grows while the host community withers.

The difference in 2026 is speed. Los Angeles took decades to drain the Owens Valley. A hyperscale data center can consume 10% of a county’s water supply from the moment it opens.

What Comes Next

The moratorium movement is accelerating, but moratoriums are blunt instruments. They freeze construction without solving the underlying problem: the United States has no federal framework governing data center water consumption. No disclosure requirements. No water-use caps. No mandatory technology standards.

Three things are likely to happen in the next two years:

Geographic redistribution. If Southeastern states continue tightening restrictions, data centers will migrate toward water-rich regions: the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes corridor, upstate New York. This does not eliminate the problem; it concentrates grid strain and water demand in fewer regions and creates new political fights.

Technology mandates. States may begin requiring zero-water or closed-loop cooling for all new data center permits, not just voluntary corporate pledges. Microsoft’s zero-water design proves the technology is viable. The question is whether regulators will mandate it before the drought gets worse.

Transparency requirements. The current opacity is untenable. When a company consumes 10% of a county’s water and will not disclose facility-level usage, the community cannot make informed decisions about permitting. Federal or state disclosure mandates are coming. The only question is whether they arrive before or after the next well runs dry.

The AI boom is not a cloud. It is a physical infrastructure buildout that consumes land, electricity, and water on an industrial scale. The communities hosting that infrastructure are bearing the cost. The drought has made that cost impossible to ignore.

The Morris family’s taps are still dry. Meta’s cooling towers are still running.