With 300 Data Centers Operating Or Planned In California, Some Residents Wondering Where The Water Will Come From

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What’s going on is the second-largest new data center being considered statewide, which would be less than half a mile from Padilla’s stucco home in the center of Imperial Valley. If finished by 2028, as the developer expects, the at least 950,000-square-foot, two-story data center could be the largest operating statewide, taking up 17 football fields’ worth of land. The roughly $10 billion, 330-megawatt data center would require 750,000 gallons of water a day to operate, said developer Sebastian Rucci, who insists electricity and water costs won’t rise due to the data center. “We have studies on the air. We have studies on the water. The electricity could be handled,” Rucci said. “We did our homework.”

Imperial officials haven’t quelled local concerns, only noting that the project is facing litigation and that the center’s long-term impacts on utilities haven’t been determined. On top of the financial burden of maintaining her family’s health, gas and grocery expenses strain Padilla’s budget and she’s worried a new data center will only increase water and power costs. Padilla, who first heard of the data center a year ago, has only grown more concerned and she’s not alone.

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California doesn’t require AI data centers to report water usage, and the state’s Water Resources Control Board does not maintain a specific list of water rights held by data centers. Although residents are working to require more transparency about water use from data centers, recent efforts to require the facilities’ owners to report how much water they use to the state have faltered. On top of the data center boom in California, the hundreds of water districts, a deepening Southwestern megadrought and the diminishing of the Colorado River increasingly complicate water issues.

Also, while data centers can take as little as two to three years to build, developing new water sources can take as long as 20 years, said Ren.Plans for the steep increase in water demand from California data centers inevitably focus on infrastructure, experts said.“ Water is not purely an environmental issue,” Ren noted. “In many places, it is fundamentally an infrastructure challenge.” Across the country, water infrastructure upgrades are estimated to cost between $10 billion to $58 billion, Ren’s research team found. How many more facilities are built and where will be a big factor in future infrastructure costs.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29042026/california-data-center-boom-water-issues/