America’s data centers are thirsty. Rural towns are paying the price—from tanked water pressure to stolen desert groundwater

In the first week of May, two data center developments, one in Arizona and another in Georgia, were caught taking public water without authorization. In both cases, data center developers consumed water they were expressly prohibited from taking, in communities already experiencing water stress, and in both cases it was the residents who discovered it. When residents complained of low water pressure in Georgia or dust control efforts in Arizona, they unknowingly tipped off regulators in areas fraught with depleting water supplies, and added to an escalating conflict over data center water use across the country. In 2023, U.S. data centers directly consumed 17.4 billion gallons of water, a figure projected to rise to between 38 and 73 billion gallons by 2028, according to the EPA. In Texas alone, a study by the Houston Advanced Research Center estimated data centers would use 49 billion gallons in 2025 and as much as 399 billion gallons by 2030—or the equivalent of drawing down Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country, by more than 16 feet in a single year. Texas is already in crisis: Reservoirs and groundwater are drying up statewide, Corpus Christi is preparing to declare a water emergency with 25% usage cuts, and communities are fighting over what remains. And so, the residential complaints in Tucson and Fayette County are part of a larger pattern. Google’s data centers in The Dalles, Ore., a city of 16,000, consumed 355 million gallons in 2021, roughly a quarter of the city’s total water supply. Google even funded the city’s lawsuit against a local newspaper that tried to obtain those figures through a public records request, arguing the data was a trade secret. A Meta data center in Newton County, Ga., disrupted nearby private wells, leaving families hauling water and replacing sediment-clogged appliances. In South Carolina, conservation groups fought Google’s permit to draw 1.5 million gallons a day. Meanwhile, in Utah, a data cen