Data Center Boom Adds New Strain to US Water Supplies Amid Widespread Drought

Samstag, 19. September 2026

Nearly half the United States is currently in drought, and the country's data center construction boom is emerging as a new, largely inflexible source of demand on the same water systems already under stress, according to federal drought data and new research from North Carolina State University published in early September 2026.

As of September 15, 2026, 49.77% of the United States and Puerto Rico, and 59.37% of the Lower 48 states, were in drought conditions, with flash drought worsening over the preceding week, per Drought.gov's national monitor. The Southeast has been especially hard-hit: Georgia, North and South Carolina — a normally humid region — are experiencing their driest stretch since 1895. Earlier in the year, the Western US recorded its lowest snowpack on record, with Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming all setting new record-low snow-water equivalent values.

Against that backdrop, NC State hydrologist Matthias Sprenger warns that the rapid national expansion of data centers is adding a new category of water risk. Large facilities using open-loop evaporative cooling systems withdraw water from municipal supplies, aquifers or nearby surface water continuously, "every day of the year," Sprenger said, and unlike residential users who can cut back during a drought by not watering lawns, most data centers cannot easily reduce cooling demand without halting operations. US data centers directly consumed an estimated 17 billion gallons of water for cooling in 2023, according to research cited by Sprenger.

The indirect water footprint may be larger still. A report from the nonprofit Ceres found that powering data centers in seven states — Virginia, Texas, California, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio and Arizona — required an estimated 3.4 trillion gallons of water withdrawals in 2024, since 78% of the electricity in those states came from power plants that themselves use water to operate, and two-thirds of that generation occurred in areas facing medium-high to extremely high water stress. Planned natural gas power projects built specifically to serve US data centers surpassed 189 gigawatts by mid-2026, nearly doubling in six months, according to Global Energy Monitor.

Sprenger noted that the impact varies significantly by location and cooling technology — a facility in arid Arizona draws more heavily on a stressed regional water supply than an equivalent facility in the Pacific Northwest, where hydropower returns water to local watersheds. He is calling for water-smart design choices, including recycled or non-potable water use, closed-loop or air-cooling systems, and renewable-powered operations, alongside more transparent public reporting of facility-level water use.

For utilities managing groundwater-reliant supply during an already severe drought year, the emerging pattern is one of accumulating, overlapping pressures: shrinking surface water, deeper reliance on aquifers, and a new class of large industrial users whose demand does not ease when the rain doesn't fall.