RIDDLE ME THIS: By 2030, U.S. data centers are projected to withdraw approximately 80 to 150 billion gallons of water annually and to consume (i.e., lose to evaporation rather than return to the watershed) roughly 60 to 110 billion gallons annually.
This is according to a March 2026 study led by Yeulin Han of the University of California, Riverside (in collaboration with Caltech), published as an arXiv preprint titled "Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Quantifying and Addressing the Impact of Data Centers on Public Water Systems" (arXiv:2603.02705).
The same study notes that data centers' peak daily water capacity needs by 2030 would require 697 to 1,451 million gallons per day of new water supply -- comparable to the entire daily water supply of New York City -- with the financial burden of that infrastructure estimated at $10 to $58 billion.
SOURCE: Han, Y., Li, P., Wierman, A., & Ren, S. (2026). "Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Quantifying and Addressing the Impact of Data Centers on Public Water Systems." arXiv:2603.02705.
I've noticed that some of the same people who pushed the jabs are now also pushing hyperscale data centers.
They're probably angry that so many people survived the jabs, allowing them to protest the data centers.