How much water do Google and Gemini use?

Google is the most transparent of the large AI operators, which mostly means its numbers get argued about the most. Its 2025 environmental report puts its data centers' water consumption at about 7.7 billion gallons for 2024, up from 6.1 billion in 2023: roughly the annual household water use of a US city of 250,000 people.

In 2025 Google also published the most detailed official per-prompt figures yet, with a published methodology: a median Gemini Apps text prompt uses 0.24 Wh of electricity, 0.26 mL of water, and 0.03 g CO₂e. Those are real measurements, and they count the median prompt and on-site water, close to our Low boundary. Critics noted the median hides long prompts, reasoning modes and image generation; Google's own per-site disclosures show how local the story gets: its Council Bluffs, Iowa campus consumed about a billion gallons in 2024, while its Pflugerville, Texas site used roughly ten thousand.

That last contrast matters more than any average: cooling design and local climate can move a data center's water use by five orders of magnitude. It is why this site's state pages track where capacity gets built, not just how much.

Gemini is the one model in our calculator with an official override: its Mid energy value uses Google's disclosed figure converted to our per-token basis. Every other model rides on benchmark classes.1,2,3