The headline number
~1B gal
consumed in 2024 by Google's Council Bluffs campus, the most of any Google data center
Water stress
Low to moderate: Iowa is water-rich, but West Des Moines documented that GPT-4-era training spiked summer draws to ~6% of the district's total, prompting new agreements.
The local story
Iowa is where AI water reporting was born. Microsoft's West Des Moines campuses, where GPT-4 trained, drew about 11.5 million gallons in July 2022 alone, roughly 6% of the district's water that month, and the utility's disclosure of that figure became the founding document of the genre. By 2024 the campuses used 68.5 million gallons a year.
Google's Council Bluffs campus is the thirstiest site Google discloses: about a billion gallons consumed in 2024. Meta's Altoona campus adds hundreds of millions more. Wind power (Iowa's grid is majority wind) keeps the Mid-scenario electricity-water term low, the inverse of Arizona.
The Iowa lesson generalizes: abundant water plus cheap wind makes evaporative cooling rational here, which is exactly why the biggest training runs landed in a state most people couldn't place on the AI map.
Cite this pagev1.3.1 · 2026-09
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Sources
Cited on this page, in order of appearance.
- 1Google (2025). Google 2025 Environmental Report. Calendar-2024 data: ~7.7B gal consumed by Google data centers (~8.1B gal company-wide, +28%); the widely quoted 6.1B gal is the 2023 data-center figure. Per-site disclosures include Council Bluffs, Iowa (~1B gal, the most of any Google site) and Pflugerville, Texas (~10,000 gal). (accessed 2026-09) official disclosure
- 2Local utility filings and news reporting (2025). Aggregated local reporting on individual data center campuses. Utility filings and local journalism on per-site water demand (Memphis, West Des Moines, The Dalles, Bluffdale, metro Atlanta), used where ESG reports do not break sites out. (accessed 2026-09) news
- 3Wisconsin Public Radio (citing West Des Moines Water Works) (2025). Microsoft built 5 data center campuses in this Iowa city. Here’s what Wisconsin can expect.. WPR, 2025: Microsoft’s five West Des Moines data center campuses used 68.5M gal of water in 2024, 2.62% of the city system’s total, per the water works’ general manager. (accessed 2026-09) news
- 4Shehabi, 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