40 million people at risk as Trump permits massive data center water consumption
After years of failed negotiations between the states and decades of negligent water management, we now have just months for federal officials to decide how to divide up the ever-shrinking flow of the Colorado River between the seven river basin states that share it — and the 40 million people relying on the river for drinking water, including right here in Colorado.
As we wait with bated breath for a conclusion, another major threat to our precious water in the American West is emerging: hyperscale data centers.
If we don’t immediately halt this buildout, we will continue the legacy of failed water management of the river: giving our water away to polluters and profit-hungry developers at the expense of our communities and our future.
Hyperscale data centers are massive facilities that house and operate computer servers. While they have been around for years, the sudden surge in hyperscale buildout is being driven by the artificial intelligence boom. By 2030, it is estimated that 70% of U.S. data center energy demand will come from these hyperscale facilities.
Massive data centers already exist or are expected to be built in the arid American West and in Colorado. A company called Global AI just purchased over 400 acres near Windsor, where it reportedly plans to operate a large data center by the end of the year — with ambitions of expanding the campus to over 1,000 megawatt capacity.
Hyperscale data centers pose many harms to our communities, including enormous consumption of electricity, loss of critical farmland and unrelenting noise pollution. When we focus on water consumption, however, the data center buildout becomes immensely more alarming.
AI data centers need unsustainable amounts of water to cool their servers. A single large data center can consume as much water as a town of 50,000 people — more than live in Windsor. By 2028, U.S. data centers could use as much water as 18.5 million households for this cooling process across the U.S. And the demand is only growing. The amount of water consumed by data centers nationally more than tripled from 2014 to 2023. This is all remarkably concerning for the American West, which is critically dry and getting drier.
And yet, we’ve seen this before. The players might be different but the results are the same: the overextension of our resources to serve corporate polluters that are wasting our water and threatening our future.
Take Colorado’s agribusiness industries, for example. Food & Water Watch analysis of agricultural census data found that Colorado’s alfalfa farms consumed an estimated 394 billion gallons of water in 2025 — enough to meet every Denver resident’s indoor water needs for over 35 years. We also found that mega-dairies in 2022 consumed 6.9 billion gallons — enough to supply water to 173,000 households.
We have already given away billions of gallons of water to these polluting factory farms at a time when Colorado is experiencing a historic and prolonged megadrought that isn’t expected to improve. We must stop the extractive industries that are driving our current water crisis and hold them accountable for the harm they are causing our communities and our water supplies.
As our leaders come up with a plan to divide up what remains of the Colorado River, we urge them to tackle the roots of this crisis and address the fact that the interests and motivations of the Big Ag and Big Tech industries are not compatible with our climate and water reality. We must boldly address the water consumption of the major polluters that are already sucking the region dry and are poised to grow even more aggressive.
No plan that does not tackle this reality head-on will be sufficient.