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How Much Water Does a Data Center Use?
Cooling a large data center can consume millions of gallons of water a year — here's how facility-level water use is tracked and reported.
Compute Atlas tracks 16 facilities that disclose a daily water figure, totaling 23.5 MGD across the dataset — a reported floor, not a dataset total, since most facilities don't publish this number.
Key statistics
16Facilities reporting
23.5 MGDTotal reported
Cooling method
Cooling method
Evaporative (high water)16 14%
Hybrid17 15%
Closed-loop (low water)62 53%
Air-cooled (minimal)21 18%