House Energy and Commerce Committee takes aim at water guzzling AI data centers

The race to build AI infrastructure has a thirst problem, and Congress is starting to notice. On September 3, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on the draft Water Cost Accountability Act, a piece of legislation designed to keep local communities from subsidizing the enormous water demands of data centers cooling racks of GPUs around the clock.

What the bill actually does

The Water Cost Accountability Act would bar public water systems from passing along the costs of water infrastructure expansions driven by data center operations to regular customers. Instead, the financial burden would fall squarely on the data center operators themselves.

The legislation would also direct the EPA to report on water sources used by “qualified data centers,” defined as facilities averaging more than 200,000 gallons of water per day.

Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie framed the hearing around accountability, noting that while data centers currently consume a relatively small fraction of water compared to other industrial users, the trajectory matters more than the snapshot. He acknowledged that technological improvements are reducing per-unit water consumption, but the sheer scale of planned AI infrastructure threatens to overwhelm those efficiency gains.

The hearing wasn’t narrowly focused on data centers alone. Lawmakers also addressed broader drinking water infrastructure challenges and cybersecurity vulnerabilities in water systems through the related Safe Drinking Water Infrastructure Improvement Act.

The numbers behind the concern

Data centers consumed an estimated 66 billion liters of water in 2023, primarily for cooling purposes. Projections suggest hyperscale data center water use could reach anywhere from 60 to 124 billion liters by 2028.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised questions during the hearing about the environmental footprint of a Meta data center in Morgan County, Georgia. Residents in the area have reported declining water pressure and face expected water bill increases of around 33%.

A bipartisan concern with state-level momentum

The federal hearing comes amid heightened scrutiny at the state level. Texas, Illinois, California, and New Jersey have all seen debates around data center water use, permitting, and resource allocation.

What this means for the data center industry

If the Water Cost Accountability Act advances, it would represent a meaningful shift in how data center economics work at the local level. Operators who currently benefit from water infrastructure subsidized by existing ratepayers would need to internalize those costs. Once Congress establishes the principle that data centers should pay their own way on water infrastructure, similar frameworks could extend to power grid upgrades, road improvements, and other municipal services strained by large-scale industrial development.

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