ESSAY · 2026

Every large data center company now has a water story to tell. “Water positive by 2030.” “Recycled water for cooling.” “A 95% reduction in evaporative use.” The language is reassuring, and it is meant to be. When a project comes to a rural county, these pledges arrive alongside the slides about jobs and tax revenue, offered as proof that the company will be a careful steward of the water it draws.

I want to be careful and fair here, because the truth has two parts, and both matter.

FIRST, THE PART THAT IS REAL

The physics is genuine. There is a real, physical difference between an evaporative cooling system that loses roughly 80% of the water it withdraws and a true closed-loop system that is filled once and recirculates for the life of the facility. Newer liquid-cooling designs, in the right cool climate, genuinely can reject heat through outdoor radiators with almost no evaporation at all. This is not marketing; it is engineering, and it is possible. I am not going to tell you the technology cannot work, because that would not be true.

So the question is not whether water-saving cooling can exist. It can. The question is whether it is actually being built, at scale, in the places where the water is being drawn — and whether anyone outside the company is allowed to check.

SECOND, THE PART THEY DO NOT ADVERTISE

Here is what the pledges leave out: almost no one is required to prove them. Data centers remain among the least transparent industrial users of water in the country. A peer-reviewed 2026 assessment in AGU Advances found that even a basic efficiency metric — Water Usage Effectiveness — is tracked by fewer than one-third of operators, leaving what the authors call significant blind spots. Most companies disclose only partial or aggregate numbers, rarely facility by facility, and sometimes leave water out of their sustainability reports entirely.

When public bodies have tried to get the real figures, they have run into walls. When the Texas State Water Board asked operators to self-report their water use to support statewide planning, only about a third responded. Utilities are sometimes barred from releasing data center water data to the public by nondisclosure agreements. In California, a bill that would have required operators to share site-level water estimates with local water suppliers was vetoed in October 2025 after industry opposition. In New Jersey, a similar disclosure bill was vetoed as well. Developers often classify their water use as proprietary information — which means the people whose aquifer is being tapped are not allowed to know how much is being taken.

What transparency we do have has often come only under legal pressure. In Oregon, it took a lawsuit to force Google to reveal that a single data center in The Dalles used 355 million gallons of water in 2021 — more than a quarter of that city’s entire supply. That number did not come from a sustainability report. It came from a courtroom.

WHY I WITHHOLD CREDIT

This is why I will not give any company credit for a water pledge on the strength of its own announcement. Not because I assume every company is acting in bad faith — I cannot see inside their intentions, and I will not claim to. But because a promise without independent, verifiable, facility-level proof is not an achievement. It is a hope, published by the party with the most to gain from our believing it.

The standard is simple and it is fair: show the data. Not a corporate-wide average that blends a water-free facility in Scotland with a thirsty one in Arizona. Not a pledge for five years from now. The actual gallons, at the actual site, drawn from the actual watershed, measured and reported to someone who does not work for the company. Until that exists, the honest assumption for any community is not the press-release exception — it is the water-intensive default, because that default is still the cheapest to build and remains the most common choice developers make.

WHAT WOULD ACTUALLY EARN TRUST

I would gladly credit a company that did the following, and I would say so plainly: publish per-facility water withdrawal and consumption, every year, for every site; allow the local water utility to disclose those numbers without a nondisclosure agreement; submit to independent, third-party verification rather than self-reporting; and disclose the water source, so a community knows whether its drinking water, its river, or its aquifer is the one being drawn down.

None of that is unreasonable. Lawmakers in a dozen states, and a federal transparency bill, are now trying to require exactly these things. Virginia took a first step in 2026: beginning January 1, 2027, water utilities must report how much water they supply to data centers each month — but only in aggregate, with individual facilities still shielded as trade secrets. That is progress. That facility-level numbers are still off-limits tells you how far from normal real disclosure remains. When a company meets that bar, with outside proof, I will update what I write here and give the credit earned. Until then, I am not being cynical by withholding it. I am simply refusing to accept a promise in place of a measurement.

The burden of proof does not belong on the farmer watching the well. It belongs on the industry drawing from it. For data centers to be believed water-positive, they must first be information-positive about the full extent of what they take. Everything else is a story, and we have been given enough stories.

This is the disclosure fight arriving in Virginia now. See what it means for Augusta County →