Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said that data centres do not use water.

The claim was made as the administration and the AI industry mounted a coordinated effort to counter local opposition to data centre construction — opposition that polling suggests is widespread, and which is arriving in an election year.

What is true, and what is not

The statement is defensible about some facilities and false as a general description, and the distinction is worth setting out because it is where the whole argument sits.

Servers generate heat and the heat has to go somewhere. There are two main ways to move it. Evaporative cooling passes water through the system and lets it evaporate, which is highly efficient and consumes large volumes — water that leaves as vapour and does not return to the local supply. Closed-loop and air cooling use very little water, but need substantially more electricity to achieve the same result.

So a specific facility built on closed-loop cooling genuinely uses little water. It uses more power instead, and that power is generated somewhere — frequently at thermal plants that themselves consume water for cooling.

The honest formulation is that data centre water use is a design choice with an energy trade-off attached, and that operators choose evaporative cooling in hot, dry regions precisely because it is cheaper — which is why the disputes concentrate in places where water is already scarce.

The proposal that would remove the public from the process

Running alongside the messaging effort is a regulatory one. An Environmental Protection Agency proposal concerning data centres would eliminate a federal requirement for public commentary on air pollution.

Air pollution enters the picture through power. Facilities of this size increasingly secure electricity through on-site generation, often gas turbines, and through arrangements that keep older fossil plants running longer than planned. Those produce emissions in the county where the building goes up.

The public comment requirement is the mechanism by which residents of that county learn what is proposed and put objections on the record before a permit is issued. Removing it does not change what is emitted. It changes who gets to say anything about it beforehand, and it removes the paper trail that later litigation depends on.

The case for removal is that permitting takes too long, that comment periods are used to delay projects rather than improve them, and that the United States is in a technology race it cannot win at the speed of environmental review. That is a real argument with real evidence behind it.

Not a foreign influence operation

Some commentary has attributed the backlash to Chinese information operations. Analysts examining the claim have found the local opposition to be exactly what it appears: residents objecting to construction, water use, noise, traffic and power costs in their own counties.

That is worth stating plainly, because attributing domestic opposition to a foreign adversary is a way of not answering it. The people showing up to county planning meetings about a warehouse full of servers are the same category of people who have spent this year cancelling surveillance camera contracts at city council meetings — local, unglamorous, and mostly unreported nationally until the numbers get large.

The political problem

The administration has made AI infrastructure central to its economic programme, and has just spent a week persuading the G20 to adopt a framework asking governments not to regulate the sector. Doubling down on data centres ahead of November is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.

The bet is that jobs and investment outweigh local irritation. The counter-evidence is that data centres employ very few people once built — construction crews leave, and a large facility may run on a few dozen staff — while the water, power and rates effects persist. Voters in a county tend to notice which of those lasts.

What would settle the water question

Facility-level withdrawal and consumption figures, published. Several operators already report them voluntarily; most do not, and the disclosure is not mandatory.

Until it is, both sides can make sweeping statements about data centres and water without either being checkable — which suits whichever side is currently being asked the question.

Sources

• Reporting on Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s remarks and the industry campaign, 3–4 September 2026
• US Environmental Protection Agency proposed rule concerning data centres
• Published analyses of data centre cooling water consumption