Photo Credit: Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun
Colorado is already suffering water stress and the AI data centers popping up across the country are incredibly thirsty. Before we jump into building them in Colorado, we need to plan for what that actually means. Direct water use by US data centers more than tripled to ~17.5 billion gallons between 2014 and 2023, and may double again by 2028. With population growth and increasing drought, Colorado’s water supply deficit is only getting worse. The Colorado Water Conservation Board estimates that, even without new data centers, we will need to find another 200-650 million gallons of water per day across the state by 2050. Just a month ago, Governor Polis activated the State Drought Task Force and Phase 2 of Colorado’s Drought Response Plan. Meanwhile, the states sharing the Colorado River still can’t agree on how to share the water equitably, even as reservoirs continue to drop. We must prioritize how we spend our precious water resources.
Data centers use a stunning amount of water. Directly, they can consume up to 5 million gallons per day to cool the computers. Many data centers have used evaporative cooling systems where 80% of the water evaporates away. In Colorado, very little of this evaporated water would precipitate as rain within the state. The remaining, now warmed and likely polluted water is returned to local water systems where it can negatively impact the environment. A recent study by researchers at the University of Illinois notes that data centers are often not transparent in reporting their water usage, making tracking and mitigating difficult. In Fayetteville, it wasn’t until residential water pressure tanked that it was discovered a nearby data center had pulled 30M gallons of water, unmetered and unbilled.
Cooling water is not even half the problem, though! Depending on the electricity source, even more water goes to generating the electricity for these energy-hungry centers because natural gas and coal use a lot of water. Given that a hyperscale facility can pull anywhere from 1-8 million MWh of electricity per year, a midrange estimate of 4 million MWh/yr under the current PRPA energy mix for Fort Collins could add as much as 20-30 million gallons of water demand per day. That’s equivalent to the entire City of Fort Collins!
These new hyperscale data centers are not yesterday’s data centers, of which there are plenty in Colorado. These are an entirely new beast. To give a sense of scale, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) is planning a new center in Wyoming that is expected to use more electricity than all the homes in the state combined. In areas of concentrated data centers, consumer electricity prices have jumped 267%. Is that what we want here in Colorado?
Where is all this water and energy supposed to come from, and what can we do? We can’t turn back the clocks and pretend that AI and data aren’t here to stay, but we can find ways to plan wisely. Rushing ahead blindly will cause a lot of pain and misery when we run headlong into problems we would have averted if we’d thought first, planned prudently, and then acted responsibly.
In this year’s state legislative session, there were two competing data center bills. Though both bills failed, we will continue to work to put protections in place. Colorado is already water-stressed and struggling financially. We can’t afford to give away our resources to companies earning billions in annual profits and we shouldn’t – it’s not right.