Can you build data centers in a desert without draining the water supply? Utah is finding out.

In late September, Governor Spencer Cox of Utah stood on the shores of the drying Great Salt Lake, flanked by top legislative leaders and wealthy developers as he unveiled a new partnership between the state government, a nonprofit, and business owners, that he said could help refill Utah’s iconic inland sea in time for the 2034 Winter Olympics.

The lake needs to rise by more than 6 feet to reach what scientists and state resource managers consider a minimum healthy elevation, a goal that environmental advocates say would require years of substantially increased water flows.

At the same time, Utah’s elected leaders have pushed for the state to be a hub for data centers, facilities that, for decades, have relied on large amounts of water to keep their servers cool, through a process known as evaporative cooling. Since 2021, Utah has added or announced plans for at least 15 new data center buildings or campuses, according to Data Center Map, and at least a few existing facilities expanded their footprints over that time.

Asked by The Salt Lake Tribune how he squared those traditionally water-intensive industries with his Great Salt Lake goals, Cox appeared steamed. “Most of the data centers do not consume water. This is a big misnomer out there,” he said in response.

Cox warned of rising electricity prices across the nation, a trend fueled, in part, by the rise of artificial intelligence and more data centers. The governor has embraced an initiative called “Operation Gigawatt” to more than double the state’s energy generation. At the unveiling of his Great Salt Lake initiative, he praised nuclear energy and its ability to power desalination plants, which could someday free up an “abundance” of water from the world’s oceans. Cox and other officials in the state have also warned of a new global “arms race” over who will ultimately control artificial intelligence technologies and the energy they need.

“If you tell people, ‘I’m sorry, you’re just not going to have any energy for the things that we need. We’re just going to have to give up and let China rule the world, because we can’t create energy because it uses some water,’” the governor continued, “that’s crazy talk.”

On the Wasatch Front, the mountain corridor where most people in Utah live, tax incentives paved the way for mammoth data campuses like the one run by Meta, the tech company behind Facebook and Instagram. The rise of AI has spurred even more demand for the thirsty and energy-intensive campuses.

“Water is extremely cheap,” said Wes Swenson, CEO of Novva, which operates a data center campus in West Jordan, a short drive south of Salt Lake City. “And cities have generally accommodated that.”

It remains to be seen whether Cox’s assurances that more data centers won’t conflict with water conservation goals will be reflected on the ground, or in a rising Great Salt Lake. How much water those campuses actually use can vary dramatically, an issue at least one Utah lawmaker says needs closer scrutiny in the coming legislative session.

A new bill sponsored by State Representative Jill Koford, a Republican, would require data centers to report their water use to the state, and that information would then be aggregated and released publicly without identifying individual facilities. Koford said their water use has been, for her and others, cause for concern. “We really don’t have any statewide guardrails for reporting and transparency,” she said. Some new data centers are using water resources more responsibly, but some legacy facilities, “not so much.”

The Salt Lake Tribune requested records from the municipal water providers for all known data centers across the state and found that several of them are siphoning away vast amounts of water. The National Security Agency’s data center in Bluffdale consumed more than 126 million gallons between October 2024 and September 2025. That’s around 390 acre-feet, or enough water to meet the annual indoor needs of nearly 800 Utah households.

Aligned Data Centers used 80 million gallons in West Valley and 47.4 million gallons in West Jordan over the same period. The eBay data center in South Jordan used 19.5 million gallons.

But true to Cox’s assertion, some newer facilities use far less. The DataBank Granite Point campus in Bluffdale used a combined 7.7 million gallons over the same 12-month stretch, just a fraction of the water used by the nearby NSA facility, even though the DataBank campus includes multiple buildings and has 2.5 times more data center space.

Requiring data centers to report their consumption “is in line with what we do with other large water users,” Koford said. “It’s such a new and emerging industry that we need to have a handle on it.”

In recent years, communities across the country have begun pushing back on the construction of data centers over concerns about scarce water resources and rising energy costs. In 2022, Salt Lake City, Utah’s capital, adopted an ordinance barring industries that use more than 200,000 gallons a day. The law wasn’t meant to target data centers specifically, said Laura Briefer, the city’s director of public utilities. But officials saw a rise in proposals for all kinds of water-intensive businesses, like bottling facilities, even as concerns grew about the region’s dire water shortages.

“We all just stepped back to say, is this appropriate in the Great Salt Lake basin?” Briefer said.

Around $64 billion worth of data center projects nationwide were blocked by local bipartisan backlash in 2024, according to a report by Data Center Watch. Almost a third of the country’s data centers lie in areas with high or extremely high water stress, including parts of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and California.

“We need good leadership and good governance,” said Kirsten James, a water expert with Ceres, an environmental nonprofit that advises investors and asset managers, “… so we don’t wipe out the gains we have made, like water efficiency, over the years.”

James led a study of data centers in Arizona that found companies and communities aren’t accounting for data centers’ full water toll. “We need to think about the solutions holistically,” she said, “to really ensure we’re managing every drop of water in the most strategic way.”

As demand for data centers surged in recent years, some companies adopted technologies like closed-loop cooling systems, or water recycling, to lessen their impacts. While these updated systems can save water, Koford noted that the trade-off is massive electricity consumption. “There’s a balance there,” she said.

That energy demand devours a lot of water, too. It takes billions of gallons every year to run Utah’s fossil fuel-fired power plants, and industries also use immense volumes of water to extract coal and natural gas.

“Data centers are using water. That is the current state of affairs,” James said. “Some may be using water more efficiently … but not everyone is undertaking that best practice.”

In West Jordan, the Novva data center covers 1.5 million square feet. It consumed 3 million gallons between October and September, public utility records show, far less than other data center campuses in Utah. Two-thirds of that water was used on the facility’s landscaping.

“I’ve lived here in Utah my whole life,” said Swenson, Novva’s CEO, “so I’m keenly aware of the long-term drought combined with population growth.”

Novva’s Utah campus used 55,000 gallons to fill up a recirculated pipe cooling system a single time, Swenson said. Had he used evaporative cooling instead, Swenson estimates his campus would use around 250 million gallons per year. But he acknowledged that Novva’s cooling system requires more energy to run.

“We think the tradeoffs for a water-free system are worth it,” Swenson said, referring to his closed-loop cooling system, because his clients demand it and reliance on water in a drought-stricken region creates a business risk.

No matter how the centers are using water, Koford said her bill gives companies a chance to tell their side of the story — to prove that they can be the partners state leaders hope they will be. “If they’re truly using water wisely, then my bill is a no big deal for them,” she said. “If you’re using a lot of water, tell us how you’re using it. Tell us how you’re recharging the system.”

The Meta data center in Eagle Mountain has vowed to be a responsible steward of the planet’s natural resources. But in 2018, the city entered into an agreement with the tech giant to keep the 4.5 million square-foot facility’s monthly water use confidential, along with other business information deemed confidential, city officials confirmed. Eagle Mountain also agreed to alert Meta whenever someone requested its records.

Koford said she’s heard from both Eagle Mountain and Meta about her proposed legislation, and that neither is thrilled by it. “That’s fine,” she said of the pushback, noting that the public release of the information will be anonymized. “This is about getting a handle on this from the state level.”

Meta declined to provide an interview for this story, but pointed The Tribune to its sustainability reports. The company’s most recent environmental data noted the Eagle Mountain campus withdrew more than 35 million gallons in 2024 — more than double the amount of water it used in 2021. It also used more than 1 million megawatt-hours of electricity, nearly five times more energy than it tapped three years before.

The city and state offered significant incentives to attract the tech giant, including a 100 percent tax exemption on personal property and an 80 percent tax break on real property for 20 years. A sales tax perk adopted by state lawmakers could save Meta an additional $5.8 million. Jared Gray, Eagle Mountain’s new mayor, said data centers like Meta provide big benefits. Meta, for instance, committed a $100 million investment for building roads and utilities to spur more development on Utah County’s west side.

Even with the tax breaks, Gray said that the city gets much-needed revenue from both property taxes and sales tax on the data center’s energy use. “It’s literally what funds our general fund,” he said.

Gray was not aware of the city’s deal to keep Meta’s water use private. He dismissed the idea that the campus uses a significant amount. “It’s safe to say it’s a lot less than they own,” Gray said.

The Utah Division of Water Rights, however, confirmed that Meta and its affiliates do not “own” any water rights in the area. It purchases water through the city instead.

In Millard County, in the central part of the state, officials are banking on data centers as an economic engine in rural Utah. The massive Joule Capital Partners data center campus, yet to be built, has rights to more than 10,000 acre-feet of groundwater — meaning it can use more than 3 billion gallons per year, without relying on a city or public water system. The property includes more than 4,000 acres and is still primarily agricultural land, but the plans for just its first phase call for 32 buildings covering a million square feet each.

Mark McDougal, the property owner and a managing partner of Joule, said his data complex will use closed-loop cooling systems to lower the site’s water needs. “It would be disingenuous for anyone to say that a data center uses zero water,” he said. But, he added, “they use far less water than golf courses or park strips or city parks.”

The 150-acre Sand Hollow Resort in Hurricane uses the most water of any golf course in southern Utah, a 2023 Tribune investigation found. It consumed 943 acre-feet in a year, or 307 million gallons. That’s more than double the water used in a year by the NSA data center near Salt Lake City.

Joule broke ground on its sprawling campus in November. An equally huge data center is also in the works a few miles north, in Delta. Eagle Mountain has approved another five data centers within its city limits, including a 300-acre site owned by Google and a QTS facility currently under construction. Until all the campuses come online, it’s difficult to know their full water demands, or whether they’ll live up to promises made about having neutral to beneficial impacts on the communities that host them.

Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University and founder of Grow the Flow, a movement to refill the Great Salt Lake, said data center water demand still pales in comparison to the water consumed by lawns and agriculture in arid Utah.

“This is something that we should pay attention to,” Abbott said, “but it’s not something that should start our hair on fire.”

Replacing thirsty alfalfa fields with server racks, as Joule plans to do in Millard County, could even have a net benefit, Abbott said. But the only way to know for sure is to collect data on the data centers themselves.

And as the state’s legislative session approaches, Koford said that that is precisely her goal. “We live in a desert,” she added. “Let’s be smart about how we use our water.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can you build data centers in a desert without draining the water supply? Utah is finding out. on Jan 21, 2026.