04/01/2026
A single data center, even a hyperscale behemoth, isn’t the issue that most concerns water experts focused on the long-term health of the Great Lakes region, home to the largest surface freshwater system on the planet and 90% of the U.S. supply of fresh water.
Instead, it’s the speed at which the hulking facilities are multiplying, sprouting like dandelions on a hillside and fueled by an AI gold rush among tech companies. AI’s fast-expanding footprint and appetite for water and electricity have “blown all the models out of the water, so to speak,” says Melissa Scanlan, director of the Center for Water Policy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
It’s this class of data centers that has water policy experts, residents adjacent to proposed sites and environmentalists concerned about massive water usage for cooling, extreme energy consumption and local environmental degradation in the Great Lakes region.
Data centers use lots of water directly, primarily for cooling their servers. This is a significant water use that has the potential to strain a municipality’s supply. Currently, the consumptive daily water use of data centers across the country is about 48 million gallons related to system cooling, a number that is poised to surge when new hyperscalers come online
That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of water used consumptively to generate electricity to power those data centers: 579 million gallons each day. That’s 627 million gallons of total consumptive use.That’s a current figure that doesn’t incorporate usage from all the planned hyperscale data centers. Water used to generate electricity doesn’t burden municipal water systems in the same way as water used for server cooling, but if data centers spur a surge in the country’s overall electricity needs, water resources will see a corresponding spike in demand, and that’s exactly what is likely to happen.
So while the Great Lakes region can easily absorb the water demands of a single hyperscale data center, their proliferation with no end in sight is concerning to water experts.
Read more here: https://www.chicagobusiness.com/forum/ccb-forum-midwest-water-data-centers-great-lakes-20260323/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=soc-own
