Petition: One Data Center Drinks What 6,500 Homes Do. States Are Approving Them Anyway.

The AI boom is being built in someone’s backyard. Across the country, hyperscale data centers are going up at a pace that local grids and water systems were never designed to absorb, and the costs are landing on the communities nearest to them. Cooling a large facility can take around two million liters of water a day, roughly what 6,500 households use, and Bloomberg has reported that about two-thirds of the data centers built or planned since 2022 sit in areas already facing high water stress. Researchers project direct water use at US data centers could reach 150 to 275 billion liters a year by 2028. The power has to come from somewhere too, which in much of the country still means gas and coal plants, along with the air Pollution and the rising utility bills that neighbors absorb. In 2025, the UN special rapporteur on safe drinking water called for a moratorium on new data centers until the rules catch up. Communities from Arizona to Missouri to Indiana have already organized and blocked projects outright. Please sign the petition urging US states to halt new data center construction until real safeguards exist.

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This is not an argument that the technology should not exist. It is an argument about sequence: right now, facilities are approved before anyone has to disclose how much water they will draw, where the power will come from, or what happens to local rates and rivers during a drought. Most companies do not report water use facility by facility, which leaves residents unable to judge the tradeoff until the permits are already signed. Wildlife and low-income neighborhoods with aging infrastructure tend to feel it first. A pause on new construction until states require honest, site-level disclosure, water-efficient cooling, and clean power commitments is the minimum a community should be able to expect before a project of this scale arrives. One Green Planet has reported on the scale of the problem in Why the Water Footprint of Data Centers Can No Longer Be Ignored, and you can read more on the wave of local opposition and its results via this overview of community campaigns. Sign the petition and tell your state to put people and water first.

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