Visualizing Water Consumption: Rainfall

This graph highlights the contrast between city rainfall and the scale of water consumption by data centers. Houston, with nearly 1.7 million acre-feet of annual rainfall, receives more than eight times Phoenix’s 200,000 acre-feet. This is a reflection of their climates, the former being water-abundant and the latter drought-prone. When placed against these baselines, the water use of data centers appears smaller but remains very significant. In 2023, all U.S. data centers together consumed about 52,257 acre-feet of water—roughly a quarter of Phoenix’s annual rainfall. A single hyperscale data center alone uses around 615 acre-feet annually, visualized here as just over a 1-mile-wide circle.