Data Centers: Cooled by Your Pee?

In an audacious marketing initiative, Liquid Death collaborated with former Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce to present an unconventional solution for mitigating the environmental footprint of AI data centers. These facilities demand substantial volumes of water to prevent their servers from overheating.

“AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water,” Kelce humorously states in the promotional video. He continues, “That’s why Liquid Death and Garage Beer have teamed up. We want your pee to cool these data centers.”

The campaign further depicts a crowd traversing a field, enjoying their branded beverages, as they collectively chant, “Let’s pee on computers together to save humanity!”

While the commercial is undeniably amusing, an even more intriguing aspect is Kelce’s inadvertent highlighting of a genuine strategy for cooling data centers.

Michael Obradovitch, Vice President of Data Center Global Accounts at Ecolab, commented to TechCrunch that “The Liquid Death commercial is funny and tongue-in-cheek.” He added, “But in reality, there is a fair amount of alternative water sources already being used to a similar extent to cool these data centers.”

The utilization of these alternative water sources in data centers serves to partially alleviate the demand for potable drinking water. Recycled water stands as a prime example, produced by treating wastewater and sewage to render it safe for industrial applications. Notably, wastewater and sewage naturally contain various components, including human urine.

Bruno Pigott, Executive Director of the WateReuse Association and former acting assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), explained to TechCrunch, “You wouldn’t just use pee, but you can clean it and make it into useful water, and that’s what we advocate.”

It is crucial to clarify that individuals should not, in practice, contribute their urine to cool data centers, as Kelce’s suggestion is purely facetious. However, for the purpose of a thought experiment, one might ponder the consequences of attempting to cool a data center with a continuous flow of untreated urine.

Pigott elaborated on the impracticality: “Pee contains all sorts of stuff. It contains salts, it contains urea, bacteria, organic matter of all sorts that can leave mineral deposits. If you just put that into a cooling tower or something else, it would require constant cleaning.” He further illustrated, “One of the methods of cooling is called evaporative cooling, where hot air is passed through water to remove heat through evaporation. Can you imagine if you just poured urine through hot air?”

While technology exists to convert urine into potable drinking water—a process employed by astronauts due to limited water supplies in space—this method is not efficient or scalable for industrial use on Earth. Furthermore, scientists lack ready access to millions of gallons of urine. Instead, toilet water typically enters municipal wastewater and sewage systems.

This is precisely where water treatment facilities play a crucial role, supplying recycled water and preventing the unpleasant odors associated with evaporated raw urine. These facilities employ advanced processes such as membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, and ultraviolet light to purify water to a standard suitable for industrial applications. In certain instances, the water can even be treated to a quality safe for drinking.

Dr. Greta Zornes, practice leader for water reuse at the engineering firm CDM Smith, informed TechCrunch, “We use recycled water for cooling for all kinds of industries, and we have for decades.” She added, “So this is only one application, but definitely, there’s been a boom in recycled water for data center cooling.”

Despite Zornes’s extensive experience—over two decades—in water reuse technology, her daily professional focus has increasingly gravitated towards addressing the surging demand from data centers.

She specifically noted, “Every day right now, I’m working on recycled water for data centers.”

Increased adoption of recycled water by data centers significantly lessens their impact on local potable water supplies. However, industries can only transition to recycled water usage where adequate infrastructure exists to treat millions of gallons of water daily.

Zornes explained the logistical challenge: “You have to be somewhat near a waste water treatment facility that’s sizable enough that you have enough water to use.” She elaborated, “So when data centers go out into rural areas, a lot of times the wastewater treatment plants just aren’t big enough — they’re not treating enough water for them to be able to take it and treat it and use it.”

Loudoun County, Virginia, situated near Washington, D.C., hosts over 250 data centers, with plans for at least two dozen more. By 2025, these data centers collectively consumed approximately 200 million gallons of recycled water daily. However, due to the extreme water footprint of these facilities, this only covered 43% of their total daily water usage in the region. The remaining 260 million gallons, constituting 57% of daily data center water consumption, originated from potable water supplies, as reported by Loudoun Water.

“There’s a lot of infrastructure that has to be built out and usually isn’t existing today, and that takes time,” Zornes emphasized. “That’s one of the problems — it’s just the time that it takes to get that done.”

Obradovitch suggests that the AI industry itself could become a catalyst for investing in the necessary infrastructure to expand water treatment capabilities. For instance, Meta is committing at least $270 million towards wastewater infrastructure projects adjacent to its data centers.

“That’s where data centers can actually come in and be anchors of water infrastructure,” Obradovitch stated. He cited examples where “data centers, as part of their engagement with communities, have committed funding and capital to some of these municipalities to help in addressing some of those exact challenges.”

From a policy perspective, Pigott is championing legislation that would offer a 30% tax credit, aiming to incentivize industries to scale their recycled water infrastructure.

He believes, “We think it would greatly accelerate the pace with which data centers and other industries entered into this area.”

Though Liquid Death’s campaign contains an element of unintentional scientific truth, the commercial and its widespread reach underscore a critical message for the tech industry: the environmental impact of data centers has evolved into a prominent public concern. A recent Gallup poll revealed that approximately seven out of ten Americans oppose the presence of data centers in their communities, while AI products continue to encounter consumer resistance from those who perceive the technology as being imposed upon their lives.

Pigott concluded, “I’m glad that people are concerned about water, and anything that raises awareness of water, however crude it may be, could actually be beneficial. It gives us a chance to educate the public about what we’re doing today.”