Water
COMMUNITY FIRST. COUNTRY ALWAYS.
Modern data centers use about as much water as an office building of the same size, and where they’ve been built at scale, local water supplies haven’t suffered.
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It’s understandable that Ohioans are worried about data centers’ effect on local water supplies.
No one wants to see local streams or wells be drained or polluted.
But the facts are:
Data centers done right have done no measurable harm to the local water supply.
The Scale Is Tiny
The Design Has Changed
Other Counties Have Already Tested This
Data centers account for under
0.2% of all water use in the country.
Of that 0.2%, roughly 80% is actually used by the power plants generating electricity for the grid, not by the data centers themselves.
In Union County, AWS’s Marysville campus only uses water cooling about 3% of the year.
The City of Marysville caps how much water data centers can draw, and the city charges extra fees for large users.
Older evaporative cooling towers are not the same as modern designs. Closed-loop systems mean the water isn’t consumed.
Instead, it circulates through a sealed system, absorbing heat from the servers before being cooled and sent back around — so the same water does the job over and over.
New Albany’s data center needs about one million gallons once to fill the closed loop when it’s built. After that, the daily use drops to around 30,000 gallons for restrooms and kitchens.
That level of usage is comparable to any building that size.
Done right, the safety of our local water supply isn’t hypothetical anymore.
It’s already been tested …
And it works.
COMMUNITY FIRST. COUNTRY ALWAYS.