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From the Desk  ·  Water  ·  August 31, 2026

Give the Data-Center Debate a Ruler

87 million gallons of water.

That is what Meta's Prineville data center used in 2024.

Big number.

Here is the problem: big compared with what?

Salt Lake City International Airport's terminal buildings used about 110 million gallons of water in 2023.

A 500-acre irrigated farm, at the U.S. average rate, applies about 244 million gallons of water.

A typical U.S. golf course applies about 22 million gallons.

So the data center used about:

• less water than the airport terminals, which used about 1.3 times as much
• one-third of the 500-acre farm's water
• 4 golf courses' worth of water

Now we have a debate.

Before, we just had a very large number wearing a hard hat.

Both sides show up without a ruler

The pro side puts jobs and tax revenue in the headline and water use in the appendix.

The anti side puts "millions of gallons" in the headline and never mentions the golf course down the road applies about a quarter of that every year.

Both are counting on the same thing: that you will not ask "compared with what?"

Corporate America turned this into an art form decades ago. Every earnings call is a masterclass in picking the denominator that makes the chart point up.

A number without a benchmark is a press release. You can put one in a 47-slide deck, add a stock photo of a windmill, and call it strategy.

"A number without a benchmark is a press release."

This is not a defense of data centers

Some are being built in places where water is tight. That fact matters, and the people asking about it deserve real answers, not a vibe.

But look at the Prineville number again, and keep both directions in view.

Water use at Prineville fell three straight years, then rose in 2024. It still sits 26 percent below its 2020 level.

Down, down, down, then up. Both halves of that sentence are true, and a real argument carries both.

Meta's company-wide 2024 water totals do not count another 1,019 megaliters withdrawn for data-center construction. That is roughly 12 times what Prineville used in a year, and it lives outside the headline figure.

The number comes from Meta. The source has a stake. That does not make it wrong, but it means you check the math - which is what the rest of this page is for.

Why Main Street has a seat at this table

Every AI tool a small business will ever use runs inside one of these buildings.

This buildout will shape your water rates, your county's tax base, and which towns get the construction jobs and which ones just get the pipes.

America is about to have this argument in a thousand county meetings. Both sides will arrive with the biggest number they could find, and neither will bring a denominator.

The owner of a 14-truck plumbing company does not have a policy team. But that owner pays for this buildout one way or another: in rates, in taxes, or in the cost of the AI tools the business needs to keep up.

So this is not a tech story. It is a Main Street story.

The move

You do not need to love data centers.

You need a ruler.

Is the water actually available there, at the volume promised, in the years promised? What jobs and tax dollars come back to the community? Is this a better use of the water than the things already using it?

Same unit. Same time period. Clear limits.

Then decide.

The next time someone hands you a number with nine digits in it, at a county meeting or in a headline, ask the only question that matters:

Compared with what?

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