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Data centers use electricity directly to run servers and cooling systems; some also consume water on site to cool equipment. Generating the electricity can consume additional water and produce emissions elsewhere. Those direct and indirect impacts have different boundaries, so there is no universal water-per-query figure—and operational electricity and water totals are not a complete lifecycle footprint.
How much electricity do data centers use?
The answer depends on whether the figure describes one country or the world, which workloads and facilities it includes, and whether it is a measured past total or a forecast. The estimates below come from different models and scopes; they should not be combined into one time series.
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United States outlook
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s United States Data Center Energy Usage Report: 2025 Update, published in June 2026, estimates U.S. data-center electricity use at 649 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2030 in its Reference Case. Its compounded uncertainty bounds are 521–843 TWh; the report also gives a 2030 range equal to 9.5%–15.3% of total U.S. electricity. These are modeled future estimates, not measured consumption. The bottom-up model accounts for planned IT equipment shipments, device energy use, cooling simulations, facility types, and locations.
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The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that data centers consumed 415 TWh in 2024, about 1.5% of global electricity. Its 2025 assessment projects around 945 TWh in 2030 and, in its Base Case, around 1,200 TWh in 2035. IEA says global data-center electricity consumption grew by around 12% annually from 2017 in its analysis. These global figures use a different scope and modeling approach from LBNL’s U.S. estimates.
IEA’s assessment includes data centers running many kinds of workloads; AI is one part of the total, not a synonym for all data-center electricity use. A global share can also conceal concentrated local demand: IEA reports that nearly half of U.S. data-center capacity is in five regional clusters, where demand can matter more to the local grid than a national percentage suggests.
How much water do data centers use?
Water accounting has at least two distinct parts: water consumed at a data-center site, often in cooling, and water consumed at electricity-generation facilities to supply the data center. The second is not water delivered to the data-center site. “Consumption” is not the same as withdrawal: LBNL defines consumption as water removed from the immediate water cycle through evaporation or other irreversible processes.
Direct water at U.S. facilities
LBNL’s 2024 report estimates that U.S. data centers consumed about 66 billion liters of water directly on site in 2023 while using approximately 176 TWh of electricity. It projected direct water consumption of 60–124 billion liters in 2024 and 145–275 billion liters in 2028. The historical figure and projections are report estimates, not measurements that apply to every facility. Direct use varies with cooling design and facility type.
Indirect water from electricity generation
For U.S. data-center electricity use in 2023, LBNL estimated nearly 800 billion liters of indirect water consumption associated with power generation—alongside 61 billion kilograms of CO2-equivalent emissions. Its 2023 national-average factors were 4.52 liters of indirect water and 0.34 kilograms of CO2e per kilowatt-hour. The calculation did not include individual facilities’ power-purchase agreements or behind-the-meter generation, so it is a grid-factor estimate rather than a facility-by-facility accounting.
In that national estimate, indirect water was substantially larger than direct site consumption. That does not mean every data center has the same ratio: electricity source, location, cooling design, and accounting boundary change the result.
Why do water and electricity estimates vary so much?
A data center’s footprint is shaped by the servers and workloads it runs, how fully the equipment is used, how it is cooled, the local climate and watershed, and the electricity supplying it. A 2025 LBNL-authored review found workload-level water-use estimates could vary by more than 10,000-fold across modeled conditions. That range reflects different assumptions and conditions; it is not a measured spread among all operating data centers.
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The review ranked these determinants: server efficiency, grid water-consumption factors, server utilization, cooling-system type, infrastructure efficiency, climate zone, percentage of inactive servers, and server refresh cycle. The ordering helps explain why a single “water per query” number is not portable from one facility or workload to another. A query’s assigned footprint depends on how much computing it requires, the equipment’s efficiency and utilization, and the facility and power system behind it.
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What does a data center’s environmental footprint include?
Operational accounting can include facility electricity for IT equipment and cooling, direct cooling-water consumption, indirect water consumption and emissions from grid electricity, and backup generation when it is measured. These categories occur at different locations: on-site cooling impacts are local to the facility, while power-generation impacts occur where electricity is produced.
For emissions context, IEA estimates that data centers cause around 180 million tonnes (Mt) of indirect CO2 emissions from electricity consumption today, excluding backup-power emissions. Its scenarios put those emissions at 300 Mt by 2035 in the Base Case and 500 Mt in the Lift-Off Case. The estimates cover all data-center workloads, with AI as one component. Scenario figures are not guaranteed outcomes.
A full lifecycle footprint is broader than those operational figures. It can also include construction, land, materials, semiconductor and server manufacturing, and end-of-life impacts. The quantitative estimates described here do not provide a complete lifecycle inventory across those stages, so electricity, water, or operational emissions totals should not be presented as the entire environmental footprint.
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No cooling approach is automatically best for every location. Comparing options requires looking at water and energy together, alongside the local grid and watershed and the facility’s operating needs. Relevant factors include:
- On-site water consumption and the local watershed’s water stress.
- Electricity demand for IT equipment and cooling, including the water intensity and emissions of the local grid.
- Climate, which affects cooling requirements.
- Server efficiency and utilization, including the share of equipment that is inactive.
- Reliability and other operational requirements.
A design that reduces on-site water use may change electricity demand, while electricity-related water impacts depend on the power supply. Site-specific assessment is needed to understand the trade-offs rather than labeling a water-intensive cooling system categorically better or worse.
How can electricity growth be managed?
The U.S. Department of Energy describes data-center loads as fast-growing, geographically uneven, and often continuous. Options it identifies for meeting and managing growth include clean generation, storage, existing nuclear and hydropower, grid expansion, efficiency, demand resources, and planning. They are tools for local system analysis, not guarantees that growth will have no impact or that a particular project’s electricity will be emissions-free.
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