Data centers are expanding into water-stressed California communities, but lax disclosure rules keep the public in the dark about actual water usage.
Data center field engineers install new cables on Thursday, July 17, 2025, at the Sabey data center in Quincy, Washington. KUOW Photo/Megan FarmerThis story is free to read because readers choose to support LAist.
If you find value in independent local reporting,The report, by the think tank Next10 and researchers at Santa Clara University, finds that planned data centers — the ganglia of artificial intelligence — areto regions reliant on overtapped groundwater and strained surface water, with potentially major effects in the Central and Imperial Valleys.the researchers found that a patchwork of state, federal and local policies allow data center operators to avoid publicly disclosing their actual water use. If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report.
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LA museum expansion prepares to make it happen The Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center is built around a towering centerpiece: space shuttle Endeavour in its 20-story vertical launch position. , an expert on the environmental impacts of AI at UC Riverside who was not involved in the study, said the findings point to a much broader problem.
“Limited publicly available information about data center water use makes it difficult for communities, water providers, and researchers to have meaningful public discussions and responsibly assess power-water trade-offs,” Ren said in an email. They found almost none. The ones they did find were largely for facilities in the city of Santa Clara.
Through interviews with planning officials, they discovered that projects can slip through with little environmental review if they fall under certain size or water use thresholds, or if they meet a city or county’s criteria for other approval pathways. These include somethingEven for data centers that undergo more stringent environmental scrutiny, the researchers found that documentation is rarely available to the public.
In the few cases the planning documents were posted publicly, the information — on the data center’s owner or operator, size, type of cooling system, the amount of water used, whether it’s recycled or potable — was often “missing, contradictory, or vague,” the report said. California’s data centers mostly cluster in the south San Francisco Bay Area and the city of Los Angeles, with smaller concentrations in Sacramento and San Diego.
But the report noted large, planned projects in rural and less affluent regions — like in Santa Clara County’s Gilroy, as well as in the heavily agricultural Imperial Valley.
“They need a bunch of cheap land,” Raicu. “If we’re not careful, they will end up being pitched, very convincingly, to communities that have real needs — without enough attention being paid to the water part. ”Khara Boender, director of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, which has opposed bills mandating more granular water use reporting, said in an email the industry is “committed to being a good neighbor.
” Boender argues that data centers collectively “used significantly less water than other essential industries in 2025, including the agriculture, power, food and beverage, and semiconductor sectors,” but the coalition offers no data to back that up. Collective use matters less than local impacts in a state where each community has its own mix of water supplies and strains, according to a previous study Whether data centers use a lot or a little water relative to agriculture or other industries, “what matters most is the scale of new local use compared to available local supply,” the Berkeley team concluded earlier this year.
“Unfortunately, this picture is clouded by data deficiencies. ” In this week’s report, the Santa Clara University team drilled into those local supplies and community vulnerabilities to anticipated expansion.
“We’re at the brink of this happening in California,” Stewart-Frey, the environmental scientist, said. Her report, she added, isn’t advocating against data centers. But “communities should know what they’re getting themselves into. ”Raicu pushed back.
“If those communities are uninformed about the issue — whose fault is that? Who should be informing the people so that you don’t have this kind of pushback, if there is no need for it? ”requiring data center operators to report estimated or actual water use to their water supplier when seeking or renewing a business license or permit.
, saying he was “reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements about operational details on this sector without understanding the full impact on businesses and the consumers of their technology. ”would bar local governments from approving new or expanded data centers unless the developer discloses information about their water use and plans.
“You cannot manage what you have not and cannot measure,” Papan said. “The public likes transparency, and they should. ” Both bills cleared a key legislative chokepoint this week but face staunch opposition from the tech industry and business groups.
“If they run out of water, guess what happens? And they can’t cool their systems — are they going to succeed? ” Papan said.
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