TL;DR · 30-second read
The Short Version
Data centers, the huge buildings full of computers behind apps and artificial intelligence, run hot, and many use water to cool down. A very large one can use about as much water in a year as a medium-sized town.
Now the people who drill wells and study underground water are weighing in. Their national association wants builders to say where their water comes from and to consider cooling with the ground instead.
Many communities rely on underground water, so what counts is what one building does to one town’s supply.
Environmental Leader reported on June 12, 2026 that the National Ground Water Association (NGWA) has released a position paper on data centers and groundwater, along with a three-part series in its trade magazine, Water Well Journal. The association wants policymakers, regulators and developers to build groundwater sustainability into siting, permitting and operations, including clear disclosure of water sources and water use.
NGWA also says it strongly supports evaluating and implementing geothermal systems and other low-water-use technologies for cooling. It cites estimates of about 110 million gallons a year for a midsize data center and up to 1.8 billion gallons for a large hyperscale facility, the very large class of site built for major cloud and AI operators.
Executive Summary
A national trade body for water well contractors, groundwater scientists and engineers, and equipment suppliers has taken a formal position on data center growth. NGWA’s paper, developed by its Data Center Task Force, argues that expansion must protect the aquifers (underground water-bearing rock and sediment) that communities and ecosystems rely on. It asks for groundwater to be considered at the siting and permitting stages, not only once a facility is running.
The announcement matters because of who is speaking and where it directs attention. Much of the data center water debate has been framed around national totals. The people who drill and monitor wells work at the scale of a specific formation and its neighboring users, which is where a single large facility’s demand would be felt.
The paper is a position, not a rule, and NGWA named no developer or regulator that has adopted it. Its practical weight depends on whether permitting authorities and data center builders take up its disclosure and technology recommendations.
Why a 1.8-Billion-Gallon Site Changes the Question
The US Department of Energy estimate cited by NGWA puts total on-site data center water consumption at 17 billion gallons in 2023, and projects that it could double or even quadruple by 2028. That implies a range of about 34 billion to 68 billion gallons. Spread across more than 5,400 US data centers, the 2023 total sounds manageable, at roughly 3 million gallons per site, although the two counts come from different years.
The facility-level estimates from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute look very different. A midsize site at 110 million gallons a year would use about 300,000 gallons a day on average, while a large hyperscale site at 1.8 billion gallons would use about 4.9 million. At that top-end rate, about ten facilities would match the entire 2023 national on-site figure. Those numbers do not reconcile neatly. Either use is heavily concentrated in a small share of sites, many facilities use little water on-site, or the estimates measure different things. In each case, the national average tells a county planner very little about the project in front of them.
This is the mechanism behind the aquifer argument. An aquifer is a local resource with its own recharge rate and its own neighboring wells, so a steady draw of several million gallons a day is assessed against that formation, not against a national total. The people most affected are permitting authorities, nearby well owners and developers whose site selection could depend on the answer. There is an important limit: a large site’s water does not necessarily come from groundwater, since it may be supplied by a utility or surface sources. That is why NGWA’s request for disclosure of water sources is central to its position.
Geothermal Is a Promising Claim That Still Needs Numbers
NGWA describes geothermal systems and other low-water-use technologies as scalable solutions that can significantly reduce, or eliminate, consumptive water use, meaning water that is evaporated or otherwise not returned to its source. The principle is familiar: rather than evaporating water to shed heat, a geothermal system moves heat into the ground. As AI workloads concentrate more heat in each server rack, any option that decouples cooling from water use will draw attention.
The announcement, however, offers no performance data, cost range or example of a data center operating this way at hyperscale. Scalability is the claim most in need of evidence, because a large facility rejects heat continuously and the ground around a site can absorb only so much of it over time. Land area, drilling costs and local geology would all shape the answer. Design matters too: a sealed closed-loop system differs from an open-loop one that pumps groundwater, and the latter would keep the aquifer directly in play.
It is also fair to note that NGWA’s task force includes well contractors and suppliers of groundwater technology, who would have a professional stake in geothermal work. That does not weaken the underlying hydrogeology, and the same expertise is what makes the group credible on the topic. It does mean that buyers should ask for the same site-specific evidence they would expect from any cooling vendor.
Disclosure Would Be the Nearer-Term Pressure on Developers
Of NGWA’s requests, disclosure of water sources and water use may prove the most immediately actionable, because it needs no new cooling technology. If permitting bodies adopted such expectations, developers could face groundwater questions earlier in site selection, when changing the location or the cooling design is still possible.
Disclosure alone would not settle the debate, because a useful figure has to specify what is being counted. Withdrawal and consumption are different measures, annual averages can obscure hot-weather peaks, and the Department of Energy’s on-site estimates by definition exclude water used elsewhere, such as at power plants. Lower water use can also carry an energy trade-off, since some low-water cooling designs draw more electricity. NGWA itself frames the coming years as critical for both water and energy demand, so the two should be weighed together.
Background
The National Ground Water Association, based in Westerville, Ohio, represents professionals across the groundwater field, including contractors, scientists, engineers, suppliers and manufacturers. NGWA president Seth Kellogg, a senior principal geologist at Geosyntec Consultants Inc., said that “groundwater professionals must play an important role in ensuring long-term water sustainability is a key consideration in the rapid growth of data centers.”
Data centers house the servers behind cloud computing and AI services, and those servers generate heat that must be removed continuously. Some cooling methods rely on water, while others use far less of it but may have different energy and cost profiles. With US facility counts already above 5,400, that design choice is increasingly tied to local questions about water supply. Source: Groundwater Pros Step Into Data Center Cooling Debate, on the National Ground Water Association’s position paper and Water Well Journal series on data centers and groundwater.Sources