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One-Quarter of Data Centers Are Located in Water-Stressed Areas, Study Shows
Confirmed
In Short: The researchers built a map to visualize the water-stressed areas where data centers are located, showing that 41% of global data centers are competing directly with cities and municipalities for their water, while another 28% are primarily used for agriculture.
A study published in Environmental Science & Technology reveals that 25% of the world's data centers are situated in areas experiencing water scarcity, a condition where water demand exceeds supply.
The research, led by a team from the Carnegie Institution for Science, analyzed the locations of 9,347 currently identified data centers worldwide.
According to the study, 33% of these data centers would be in regions experiencing water gaps under future hydrological conditions, based on climate models and a 3°C (5.4°F) rise in average global temperature from 1900 levels.
The United States hosts 39% of data centers, with 21% located in water-scarce regions, where overlap with municipal and agricultural demands is pronounced.
The study found that 25% of data centers have already experienced at least one month of water gap annually under 2001–2010 hydrologic conditions.
Data centers often require significant amounts of water for cooling purposes, with some facilities consuming as much water daily as a town of 50,000 people.
The research highlights that data centers overlap with water demands from municipal (41%), irrigation (28%), manufacturing (18%), and power generation (8%) sectors.
For 523 facilities, or a little over 5% of the total, there are already water gaps for at least nine months of the year.
The study's authors note that information on data center water usage remains limited, as tech companies are often reluctant to share exact demand levels.
While data centers typically have the financial capacity to secure water supplies, the primary risk may not be to the data centers themselves but to other water users within the same basins.
Environmental scientist Lorenzo Rosa from the Carnegie Institution for Science emphasized that these facilities are not landing in empty landscapes but are competing with cities and farms for water.
The paper "One Quarter of Global Data Centers are Located in Water-Stressed Areas". was published in Environmental Science & Technology in 2026.
What this adds
The study assesses the current and future exposure of all 9,347 currently identified data centers worldwide to water gap conditions, areas where water demand exceeds available supply, resulting in unsustainable water consumption and an increase in water stress.
The extent to which water-stress exposure translates into operational impacts for data centers themselves or into measurable consequences for other water users remains an open question to address.
The researchers note that information on data center water usage remains limited, as tech companies are often reluctant to share the exact level of demand these facilities are putting on natural resources.
Background
As data centers expand across the country, they are becoming a contentious issue, with both economic benefits and environmental concerns.
What's confirmed
- Ensuring data center long-term viability will require siting and governance choices that account for local hydrological limits.
- Data centers need water to stay cool and functional, and lots of it: The larger facilities can consume as much water a day as a town of 50,000 people, and because much of the cooling involves evaporation, freshwater is often preferred.
- In a new study published in Environmental Science & Technology, researchers led by a team from the Carnegie Institution for Science in the US mapped the location of the 9,347 currently identified data centers worldwide.
- When the local water conditions of all these sites were analyzed, the team found that around 25 percent of data centers are in areas where there's a water gap during at least one month of the year – that's when water demand outstrips supply.
What's still developing
- Abstract The rapid growth of digital services is increasing the demand for high-performance computing within data centers, intensifying the demand for local natural resources, particularly energy and water.
- The extent to which water-stress exposure translates into operational impacts for data centers themselves or into measurable consequences for other water users remains an open question to address.
- "Water scarcity is measured locally, inconsistently, and often not at all." "So, we built the map because it did not exist." The map showed that 41 percent of global data centers are competing directly with cities and municipalities for their water, while for another 28 percent of sites the primary water use is for agriculture.
- "The energy footprint of data centers has been quantified in detail because electricity is metered and reported," says Rosa.
- Most data centers pushed beyond the water gap threshold by temperature rises would be in the US, the modeling showed, while in countries such as the UK and Germany there wouldn't be much change.
- It typically needs to be sourced locally, which means the local conditions at sites chosen for data centers really do matter.