US Data centers use less water annually than 2 Days of Americans watering their lawns

WARNING! JOURNALIST ATTEMPTING TO DO MATH!

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Five, Issue 19

Yeah, down by the river
Down by the banks of the river Charles
Oh, that’s what’s happenin’, baby
That’s where you’ll find me
Along with lovers, muggers, and thieves
Oh, but they’re cool people

Well, I love that dirty water
Oh, Boston, you’re my home

Missed it by…a factor of 1,000

AI Data Centers are going to suck community water centers dry, according to one of the more frightening claims of the angry protestors demanding a stop to data center construction across the country.

Now I’ve run data centers, and this is…what’s the right word…batpoop nutz. Where did it come from? An off-cited reference is the book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, by Karen Hao, which covers a proposed data center in Cerrillos, Chile: In other words, the data center could use more than one thousand times the amount of water consumed by the entire population of Cerrillos, roughly eighty-eight thousand residents, over the course of a year.

It would be best if such stories bore a large red label: WARNING! JOURNALIST ATTEMPTING TO DO MATH! Steve Ross used to tell Columbia Graduate School of Journalism students. People who can actually do math or at least work a calculator/spreadsheet quickly pointed out that this was wildly improbable. The amount of water cited by Hao, 5,097,946 liters annually, divided by Cerrillos’ 88,000 residents, divided by the 365 days in a year, works out to 0.158 liters of water per person daily. Adults need a minimum of 2.7 liters daily, according to the Mayo Clinic. And since the streets of Cerrillo are not clogged with the corpses of those who died of thirst, obviously there was an Error Some Place.

To her credit, Hao has issued a correction: Based on the current best information available, it seems that this document used the wrong units. Where it states that its figures are in liters (“litros de agua” in Spanish), it’s likely that the figures are in cubic meters, where 1 cubic meter = 1,000 liters. As a result the document appears to understate Cerrillos’ residential water use by (a factor of) 1,000, which would make my subsequent comparison between the population’s and data center’s water usage also off by (a factor of) 1,000.

As the Great Western Philosopher Maxwell Smart says, Missed it by that much…

In fact when it comes to US water use, data centers use less water annually than two days of Americans watering their lawns. And that’s residential lawn care.

If you are really worried about water use, start picketing local golf courses.

Now while dunking on the innumeracy of journalists is endlessly amusing, there is a much more serious point. Despite everyone including the author agreeing that the book was mistaken, Google Search shows about a dozen stories covering protests and disputes about data center water usage. In the last 24 hours.

Oh, and you don’t actually need water cooling for data centers. You can air cool them; that increases electricity costs by roughly 10 to 15 percent.

But the real question is posed by our 250th Independence day this past weekend. Much of the American story is that of restless folks fleeing rules and regulations and setting out for the frontiers to build stuff without the strictures of planning commissions, HOAs and their ilk. Westward, Ho! stopped when we hit the Pacific; the lower 48 has since filled in with bureaucrats.

There are no bureaucrats in space.

There are no protestors in space.

Here’s the thing: right now Elon Musk and a bunch of tech execs are looking at all this sturm und drang, watching Micron spend 4 years checking trees for bats and still hasn’t started building its new chip plant in Syracuse, and they are all thinking the same thing.

It would be faster and easier and far, far less aggravating to just build all this in space.

The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, July 1-7, 2026

Perfecting Equilibrium Stories

Easter Eggs

My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.

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