The water story
Evaporative cooling is how most large data centres shed heat — one kilowatt-hour of computing typically costs one to two litres of water on site. Sited in a desert, that is a policy problem. Sited beside a continental river system, it is a rounding error.
Until recently, data-centre water use was a trade secret. It is now measured, litigated, and audited. These are published figures, not projections of ours.
Projected global AI water withdrawal in 2027
4.2–6.6 billion m³
Freshwater evaporated training GPT-3 in US data centres
700,000 L
US data centres’ direct (on-site) water use in 2023
~17 billion gal
Projected US hyperscale data-centre water use by 2028
16–33 billion gal/yr
The state legislature’s own audit commission found data centres consumed about 2.1 billion gallons in 2023 — up 86% since 2019 — and that municipalities often cannot disclose more because of NDAs.
Water consumed by Virginia data centres in 2023 (+86% since 2019)
2.1 billion gal
In The Dalles, Google treated its site’s water use as a trade secret until The Oregonian’s public-records suit settled in 2022. Secrecy is no longer the default.
The Oregonian’s public-records suit forced Google to stop treating The Dalles water use as a trade secret
2022
A national tracking project counted $64 billion of US data-centre projects blocked or delayed by local opposition between May 2024 and March 2025 — much of it over power and water.
US data-centre projects blocked or delayed by local opposition, 2024–2025
$64B
A peer-reviewed study also found roughly one in five US data-centre water withdrawals comes from moderately or highly water-stressed watersheds — the desert bet, colliding with the desert reality.
US data centres drawing cooling water from stressed watersheds
~1 in 5
The industry’s water problem is not cooling technology — it is geography. The same kilowatt-hour, sited beside a hydro reservoir and a major river, costs almost nothing the watershed will miss.
On-site water per kWh
Read this honestly: 0.2 L/kWh is our design target, not a measurement — no facility exists. 1.5–1.8 L/kWh is published practice. The claim we stand behind today is the geography, not the number.
Nine of our thirteen proposed sites sit on named river or lake systems — the St. Lawrence, the Mackenzie, the Churchill–Nelson, the Yukon. Others are on tidal coasts.
Hydro provinces sell stable-priced, ~99% clean power. Water and power are the same resource in Canada — the reservoirs that make the electricity are the reason the water is managed at scale.
Northern sites target free-air cooling most of the year, which is what makes a near-closed water loop credible: the less you evaporate by design, the less the watershed notices you at all.
Talk to us about a pilot site, a research partnership, or the concept round.