Do data centers really guzzle water? The answer is tied to another question — how many tokens is a hamburger worth.
-
One of the central arguments against building new data centers for the AI industry is that they require enormous quantities of water.
In the United States, a genuine war is playing out between tech companies trying to build data centers wherever they can and residents fiercely defending their water and electricity supplies.
But when you dive into the numbers, a somewhat different story emerges.
-
The site in the image is an aerial photograph of Colossus 2, a massive data center in Memphis owned by xAI — Elon Musk's AI company behind the Grok chatbot.
The website SemiAnalysis compared Colossus 2's water consumption to that of the meat industry.
This data center consumes 346 million gallons of water per year — roughly 1.3 billion liters. That sounds like an enormous amount, until you compare it to the water footprint of a single burger joint.
The amount of water required by the cattle industry to produce a single hamburger is 245 gallons. By that measure, an In-N-Out location selling 600,000 hamburgers a year consumes approximately 147 million gallons annually — and the chain has more than 400 active locations.
xAI's data center is therefore comparable in water consumption to just 2.5 large hamburger outlets. Given the far greater number of users it serves, its water efficiency is significantly better.
This comparison covers only blue water (potable water drawn from the municipal supply). When green water is also factored in (rainwater absorbed by the soil to grow pasture grass, for example), the water footprint of a hamburger can jump to as high as 700 gallons.
-
Taking the comparison one step further: the water required to produce a single hamburger is equivalent to generating 2.7 billion tokens from an AI model.
At a usage rate of 30 queries per day, that is enough tokens to serve one user for 668 years.
xAI is also building a municipal wastewater recycling facility in parallel, which could bring its net water consumption to zero.
-
Water consumption in the context of data centers is an important topic that deserves serious discussion. The environmental impact can be significant, especially in regions that depend on that water for agriculture.
At the same time, it is worth remembering that a data center serves tens or hundreds of millions of users, and its water use for operations may well be justified — particularly when compared to the meat industry.
And finally:
If you were wondering why the roof reads MACROHARD, it is a jab at Microsoft (micro soft = small and soft, macro hard = large and hard). Not exactly mature — but this is Musk. :-)
--
👋 Hi, I'm Shlomo Strauss — follow me for more content on science and technology.