Data centers
must go.

Berkeley Lab modeled 66 billion liters of direct on-site water consumption for the entire U.S. data-center fleet in 2023—not AI alone. The number is real. At national scale, it is small beside irrigation. At local scale, a large facility can still put meaningful pressure on a particular water system.

At the highest of six reviewed Virginia utilities, data centers used 21% of non-reclaimed water in 2023. That is a material local demand. Across the state, data centers were less than 0.5% of all water withdrawals, and just over one-third of their reported water came from reclaimed supply. Neither scale cancels the other.

NVIDIA says Rubin’s fully liquid-cooled reference design fills its coolant loop once, then recirculates that liquid for the life of the facility. In suitable climates, 45°C coolant can release heat through outdoor dry coolers without evaporative cooling towers, bringing on-site cooling-water consumption near zero.

Cattle-feed crops, including alfalfa and other hays, accounted for 46% of direct human consumption, 32% of all consumption, and 62% of agricultural consumption in the Colorado River basin. The basin totals imply roughly 7.6 trillion liters a year for those crops, about 115 times Berkeley Lab’s 66-billion-liter estimate for direct on-site water at the entire U.S. data-center fleet.

Berkeley Lab estimates that U.S. data centers consumed 176 TWh in 2023. EIA’s 2022 Manufacturing Energy Consumption Survey reports 58.5 TWh of net electricity demand for iron and steel mills and ferroalloys, and 20.3 TWh for alumina and aluminum production and processing.

From 2010 to 2018, global data-center compute instances increased 550% while electricity use rose about 6%, from roughly 194 to 205 TWh. Efficiency, virtualization, and a shift toward hyperscale facilities drove the separation.

The IEA projects renewables will meet nearly 50% of global data-center electricity-demand growth from 2024 to 2030, while natural gas and coal together meet more than 40%. This is physical supply in a base-case projection, not operators’ annual certificate claims.

Researchers used software to reduce power draw in a 256-GPU cluster by 25% during three peak-demand hours while meeting the service targets they tested. The demonstration required no new energy-storage hardware.

Virginia’s JLARC reports that a typical 250,000-square-foot facility may have about 50 full-time workers, while construction can peak near 1,500. A 2026 NBER working paper looks beyond the facility: its 1995–2020 IV estimate associates data-center presence with 17.5% more total county employment and 28.8% more establishments. The same model estimates 3.9% higher electricity prices.

Many Richland Parish certified school employees with at least four years of experience received $50,935 end-of-year payments in 2026; classified staff received $17,472. The district tied the unusually large checks to construction-driven sales-tax growth around Meta’s Hyperion project.

In the IEA’s Widespread Adoption Case, existing AI applications could avoid 1.4 gigatonnes of CO₂ in 2035—three times the data-center emissions in its high-growth Lift-Off Case. The IEA also says current momentum does not guarantee that adoption level.

In a cluster-randomized trial across 74 units, the CONCERN early-warning intervention was associated with a 35.6% lower instantaneous risk of in-hospital death; unanticipated ICU-transfer risk increased 24.9%. An April 2026 author correction reports an adjusted length-of-stay incidence-rate ratio of 0.96 (95% CI 0.93–0.99), replacing the larger reduction first published.

Meeting 649 TWh would require a major expansion of generation and transmission, with interconnections completed fast enough to serve the regions where large campuses are clustering. Large-load tariffs, long-term contracts, upfront contributions, efficiency, and flexible computing can reduce risks and assign costs, but none is guaranteed at the necessary scale or on time.