Berkeley Lab Puts U.S. Data Center Water Use at 17.4 Billion Gallons as Indigenous Groups Fight Sites

Water drawn directly by U.S. data centers reached about 17.4 billion gallons, or 66 billion liters, in 2023, based on research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Generating the electricity to run those sites pulled a further 211 billion gallons, or 800 billion liters, the laboratory estimated.

Demand is set to climb steeply. The energy needed for data centers is expected to double to 945 terawatt-hours by 2030. A single conventional data center, which houses thousands of computers and other equipment supporting services such as cloud storage, may draw around 10 to 25 megawatts of power per year, according to the International Energy Agency.

The growth is drawing opposition from Indigenous communities living near existing and planned sites. Maren Storslett of the Sámi Parliament, which represents Indigenous interests in Norway, said large data centers are already straining Sápmi territories.

The Anacé Indigenous people in Brazil filed an official complaint before federal authorities last year, asking regulators to cancel a $10 billion data center for the social media platform TikTok on their land. The filing seeks to halt that single project outright.

The two disputes sit at different scales. Storslett described a broad territorial strain across Sápmi lands, while the Anacé complaint targets one named project and a fixed $10 billion price tag.