Data center water use varies widely, but reporting remains inconsistent

Claims about data centers’ water use range from outdated or exaggerated to understated, according to a TechRadar analysis by Gabriel Lazar. The article says water impacts depend on factors including cooling technology, climate and what is counted.

One widely repeated claim says every ChatGPT conversation uses a bottle of water. The article traces it to an estimate based on public data, not a data center meter reading. It says researcher Shaolei Ren later indicated the GPT-4 estimate was likely too high, putting total use closer to 15 ml per prompt, including 5 ml for on-site cooling. In August 2025, Google reported that a median text prompt to Gemini used 0.26 ml of on-site water.

Facility figures also differ sharply. Google said in 2024 that one Texas data center used about 10,000 gallons of water in a year, while its largest water user, in Iowa, used around a billion gallons. The article also distinguishes water withdrawal and return from water consumption.

In the US, data centers account for 0.3% of direct annual public-supply water consumption, the article says. Agriculture accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals, according to the UN World Water Development Report. Yet a facility’s local impact can be significant when its water use is concentrated in one municipality.

The article says Microsoft, Google and Amazon have committed to being water positive by 2030, and that EU rules require annual water reporting from data centers above 500 kW. It calls for standardized, facility-level, independently verifiable reporting of water withdrawals, discharge and consumption.