Data centers
AI data centers and water, state by state
Per-prompt water is milliliters; a hyperscale campus is millions of gallons a day. This map tracks where US AI capacity actually sits, what each state's water situation is, and what local reporting has established: the page local journalists need when a data center comes to town.
The national picture
176 TWh
US data center electricity, 2023
17B gal
direct water consumed, 2023
~2× both
2028 projection
Share of tracked facilities, by state
Facility counts are approximate (NREL infrastructure map, industry trackers) and labeled as estimates. Percentages are each state's share of the ~1,680 facilities tracked across these ten states, not of all US data centers.
The ten states that matter most
- 01Virginia~600 · 36%~25% of US data center capacity runs through Northern Virginia, the largest concentration on Earth
- 02Texas~350 · 21%~10,000 gal used in 2024 at Google's Pflugerville site, the least of any Google data center: proof that siting and cooling design, not AI itself, set the water bill
- 03Georgia~150 · 9%#1 fastest-growing US data center market by new capacity under construction in the mid-2020s (Atlanta metro)
- 04Arizona~120 · 7%120+ facilities in a state whose Colorado River allocation was just cut, the sharpest siting paradox in the country
- 05Ohio~120 · 7%New Albany hosts Google, Meta, Microsoft and AWS campuses on one suburban plain, the Midwest's data center capital
- 06Oregon~100 · 6%~29% of The Dalles' total water went to Google at peak, a figure the city fought 13 months in court to keep secret
- 07Washington~80 · 5%Quincy a town of 8,000 whose hydro-powered data centers made it the per-capita compute capital of America
- 08Pennsylvania~70 · 4%Nuclear-first the AWS-Talen campus beside the Susquehanna plant made Pennsylvania the template for reactor-adjacent AI
- 09Iowa~50 · 3%~1B gal consumed in 2024 by Google's Council Bluffs campus, the most of any Google data center
- 10Utah~40 · 2%2nd-driest state in the country, where data center growth shares a basin with the shrinking Great Salt Lake
Cite this pagev1.3.1 · 2026-09
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Sources
Cited on this page, in order of appearance.
- 1Shehabi, A., Smith, S. J., Hubbard, A., et al. (2024). 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LBNL-2001637: 176 TWh electricity and 17B gal direct water in 2023, with 2028 projections. (accessed 2026-06) government
- 2Siddik, M. A. B., Shehabi, A., & Marston, L. (2021). The environmental footprint of data centers in the United States. Environmental Research Letters 16(6): watershed-scale direct + indirect water footprint. (accessed 2026-06) peer-reviewed