# 2001–2010 Model Finds Water Gaps at One in Four Data Center Sites

By Simon Yoon

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/36670
Published: 2026-10-21T12:39:32.000Z
Updated: 2026-10-21T12:39:32.000Z
Section: Technology

> The United States accounts for 3,619 mapped facilities, with 21% in areas showing at least one month of modeled water stress.

Under modeled 2001–2010 water conditions, 21% of U.S. data center locations would have encountered at least one month when demand exceeded supply, a constraint for facilities sharing water with surrounding communities.

Worldwide, about 25% of 9,347 operating data centers were in areas with the same modeled gap. Roughly 6% were in places where the gap lasted nine to 12 months a year. The analysis applies historical water conditions to currently identified facilities; it does not describe water availability at those sites today.

The United States accounts for 3,619 of the mapped facilities, or 39% of the global total. Its 21% exposure rate is below the worldwide share. Both figures describe the water conditions around facility locations, rather than water used by the data centers themselves.

Cooling systems can draw on supplies shared with homes, farms and industry. Municipal use is the largest source of water demand in areas containing 41% of the mapped facilities. Irrigated agriculture leads in areas containing another 28%.

Those percentages identify the leading type of demand in each area; they do not assign that demand to data centers. A location may show a supply gap without the analysis establishing that a facility there caused it. The model also does not calculate how much water any individual data center consumes.

“These facilities are not landing in empty landscapes. They are landing on top of the water supply of cities and farms,” said Lorenzo Rosa, the study’s lead author.

Under a scenario in which global temperatures rise three degrees Celsius above 1900 levels, the share of mapped sites exposed to at least one month of water stress could reach 33% worldwide and 35% in the United States. Those figures describe a scenario, not measured conditions at the facilities today.

The scenario holds the locations of existing mapped data centers fixed. It therefore shows how the same sites could be exposed under the stated warming level, without projecting where new facilities will be built.