Water

Where AI campuses draw their water, how much, and what the permits say, place by place. Every sentence below is the book’s own, from THE AI COMPUTE RACE or its companion chapter, with the campus page and the chapter it comes from. The book prints no national total; where it gives a figure it is one campus’s, from a filing, a court record, a utility or a reporter, and each line’s source is in the book’s Notes.

Memphis and Southaven — Colossus (xAI, SpaceXAI)

In its first summer, 2024, it had drawn about 30,000 gallons a day, against the million a day then projected for it at full speed. In March 2026 it bought more than 25 million gallons of aquifer water from the city utility in the month, over 800,000 gallons a day, by the count of Protect Our Aquifer, an advocacy group; FOX13 Memphis, given the group’s records with the utility’s bills among them, put March at 24 million gallons. On 1 September the utility’s chief executive told the council’s committee that the company was using less than a million gallons a day, the Commercial Appeal reported, and that its peak demand under its agreement with the utility was 1.82 million gallons.

The third is a promise of water, a land sale for a water-recycling plant, thirteen acres for $820,000 on 18 March 2025, nine votes to one with one abstention. By August 2026 the plant had not delivered a gallon; a local station reported that construction was to resume in January 2027, the utility’s chief said in September that it “could be completed by 2028,” and on 29 September 2026 Musk said, “we’re building a water recycling plant.”

Asked by ABC24, a Memphis station, later that month whether specific guidelines or restrictions were in place for water use by datacenters, the utility “confirmed there are currently none in place,” the station reported. McGowen wrote to customers on 19 October that “MLGW is creating a new rate structure for data centers that will increase their water rates by 30%.”

Chapter 9, The Price of Permission; Consent, Place by Place. Campus page: colossus-2.

Doña Ana County, New Mexico — Project Jupiter (Oracle, for OpenAI)

The water at issue had a number on each side. Asked by CBS News by phone how much water the campus would use, a woman the reporter billed as “a VP from Oracle” put it at “about the equivalent of nine households” over time. The reporter, Riley Callanan, said on air on 27 August 2026 that the figure was averaged over fifteen years: 11 million gallons “to fill up the data center initially,” then, because the cooling is closed-loop, about 168,000 gallons a year, with what the reporter called “construction costs” not counted. The Center for Biological Diversity, which filed it on 20 August, said that since April 2026 more than 103 million gallons had been pumped from the well, on meter readings it had obtained from the State Engineer’s office.

Chapter 9, Expanded. Campus page: the ledger’s Doña Ana row.

Texas — the state’s survey and the audit

On 14 September the governor wrote to the state’s water board that “Major water users, including data centers, appear to have committed civil and criminal violations by failing to provide the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) with information about water usage as required by the Texas Water Code,” and told it to join ERCOT’s audit; the letter names no company and counts no violation. Ten days later the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced through his office that he “is investigating Texas data center developments that have not provided a response to the Texas Water Development Board’s” water-use survey, naming counties and no company.

Chapter 6, Firm, Around-the-Clock.

Tucson, Arizona — Project Blue

“When Project Blue came there and said, ‘Hey, we need 50,000 houses worth of water every single day,’ the city council voted unanimously, ‘No, you can’t get that much water. The developers re-engineered the cooling “a little bit,” in the senator’s words, from evaporative cooling, which spends water, to air conditioning, and the campus will be built in unincorporated Pima County instead of the city. A refusal on water became a design change and a change of jurisdiction.

Chapter 9, The Price of Permission; Consent, Place by Place.

Cerrillos, Chile — Google

In Cerrillos, outside Santiago, a water activists’ group read all 347 pages of Google’s environmental filing and found in it up to 169 liters of groundwater a second for cooling, at full capacity, nine years into the country’s megadrought. In 2024 Chile’s Second Environmental Court ordered the project’s environmental assessment reopened over the water. On 16 October 2026 the Service’s regional office answered that it need not, for a project of 63 air-cooled chillers “cuyo funcionamiento no requiere consumo de agua,” whose operation needs no water, in an opinion that by its own words grants no right to build and leaves the environmental superintendency its power to require entry.

Chapter 13, A Change of Landlord; Consent, Place by Place.

Canelones, Uruguay — Google

In July 2023 the Guardian reported, from environment ministry figures that Daniel Pena had obtained by legal action, that the plant “would use 7.6m litres (2m gallons) of water a day to cool its servers,” the domestic use of 55,000 people, in the country’s “worst drought in 74 years”; the industry ministry called the figures out of date, and Google called them preliminary.

Chapter 13, A Change of Landlord; Consent, Place by Place.

West Des Moines, Iowa — Microsoft

In July 2022, during GPT-4’s training, Microsoft’s West Des Moines datacenters drew about 11.5 million gallons of the district’s water, about 6 percent of it.

Chapter 2, The Discovery That Changed Everything.

Abilene, Texas — Stargate (Crusoe, for Oracle and OpenAI)

In the interview of 3 October 2026, Crusoe’s chief executive, Chase Lochmiller, said that modern AI factory designs “use pretty close to zero water.” He said one of Crusoe’s buildings at Abilene uses “about the same water annually as about 10 single family homes,” its chips cooled by water in a closed loop.

Chapter 9, Expanded. Campus page: stargate-abilene.

Australia — Sydney and the Commonwealth’s rules

Sydney Water, the broadcaster reported, says datacenters could use up to 25 percent of the city’s drinking water by 2035. “Australia is the sunniest continent on earth but we’re also the driest,” so the rules “will require data centres to minimise their water use, maximise their energy efficiency, and pay for any additional water infrastructure required.”

Chapter 13, A Change of Landlord.

Spain — the draft decree

Its energy regulator’s opinion of 22 September 2026 on the government’s draft decree describes a rule under which a datacenter would take its renewable supply from plant in Spain commissioned no more than eighteen months before the datacenter itself, hold its power-usage effectiveness at or under 1.15 and its water-usage effectiveness (the water consumed for each unit of computing energy) at or under 0.1, and face surcharges on its grid tolls and the loss of its grid access if it did not.

Chapter 6, Firm, Around-the-Clock.

What the builders say

“The number one product that uses water is an almond farm. I mean data centers don’t use water. The builder of the Memphis machine had put it only a shade less flatly in July: “the water usage of AI is negligible, almost nothing.”

Chapter 9, The Price of Permission.