Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on CNBC on September 2, 2026 and treated the data center water fight like a joke. He said “One of my favorite things is when people talk about data centers using water. The number one product in America that uses water is cattle. I mean, data centers don’t use water. This is propaganda by our adversaries to try to slow us down.” [1]
But who is really spewing the propaganda?
About a year earlier on Fox News with Sean Hannity, he said the opposite. “These AI things suck water. They need water.” He used that water demand as a jobs pitch. He said the cooling systems need HVAC specialists, not a regular plumber, and that those jobs start around $100,000. Lutnick’s creation of jobs was exaggerated. A large hyperscale building only keeps a few dozen people on staff in total, so those high-paid cooling jobs number in the handfuls per site, not the thousands his pitch implied. [2]
Does he think we are stupid and won’t notice the flip flop?
When Howard Lutnick speaks remember this is the same man who said, after a 2005 meeting, that he had cut Jeffrey Epstein off for good, repeated that claim on a podcast later, yet he still took his wife and kids to lunch on Epstein’s island in December 2012. He admitted that island lunch to the Senate on February 10, 2026. [3] [4]
The real truth of the matter is that AI Data centers suck massive amounts of water. These are not conspiracy theories by a bunch of luddites or propaganda from the left or China.
These are actual numbers from the data center companies.
- Google / Alphabet data centers in 2024: 7,787 million gallons consumed and 9,866 million gallons withdrawn. Official table: http://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/alphabet-fy2024-environmental-indicators-assurance-letter.pdf
- Google Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 2024: 1,410 million gallons withdrawn and about 1,010 million gallons consumed. Same official table.
- Google The Dalles, Oregon: about 434 million gallons in 2024 from the city water system. Local reporting: http://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/23/the-dalles-mayor-data-center-google/
- Amazon data centers in 2025: 2.5 billion gallons. Amazon’s own post: http://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-data-center-water-usage
- Same Amazon figure in trade press: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/amazon-data-centers-used-25bn-gallons-of-water-in-2025/
More factual water usage numbers:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: U.S. data centers used about 17.4 billion gallons on-site in 2023, up from about 5.5 billion gallons in 2014. Hyperscale sites alone are projected at 16–33 billion gallons a year by 2028.
Congressional Research Service: about 17 billion gallons of direct on-site use in 2023 versus 5.6 billion in 2014. Roughly 97% of that water comes from municipal systems.
Pacific Institute (Sept. 2026): individual facilities range from 270 gallons to 3.9 million gallons per day.
According to the IEA a typical U.S. data center uses about 530,000 gallons per day. A giant hyperscale site can run into the millions of gallons a day. Sites that evaporate water use a lot, and most of that water leaves as steam. It does not return to the local river, well, or farm ditch.
Closed-loop water cooling systems for AI data centers still use significant amounts of water.
The data center advocates say that the newer closed loop water systems don’t use water except in the initial filling of the water reservoir. But research proves them wrong. In these systems, water or coolant circulates in sealed pipes or loops to absorb heat from servers. However, the heated water often passes through cooling towers or heat exchangers where some of it evaporates into the air to release heat. This evaporation leads to ongoing water loss, requiring fresh makeup water to keep the system running. While true closed-loop designs reduce water use compared to older open systems, they still use large amounts, especially in large AI facilities handling high heat loads. A single large data center can still consume hundreds of thousands to millions of gallons per day, depending on its size and location.
The Wastewater from the Data Centers Contaminates our Waterways
The wastewater, known as blowdown, also creates pollution concerns. As water recirculates and evaporates, minerals and chemicals build up. Operators periodically drain some of this concentrated water to prevent damage to equipment. This discharge often contains treatment chemicals such as biocides (to control bacteria and algae), corrosion inhibitors, scale preventers, and sometimes heavy metals or elevated mineral levels. If not properly treated before release to sewers or waterways, it can harm aquatic life, alter pH levels, increase salinity, or overload local wastewater treatment plants. Warmer discharged water can also cause thermal pollution, stressing ecosystems. [5]
When a both an evaporative cooling system and a closed loop water system discharge the water to clean out the buildup, they have to refill the system. Thus, even more water is used.
Only Half of the Story of Water Usage: The Power Plants Use Water Too.
The water usage at the building is only part of the load. These campuses also burn through huge amounts of electricity. Power plants that make that electricity use water to stay cool. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put direct U.S. data-center water in 2023 at about 17 billion gallons. The same research put the water used at power plants serving those facilities at about 211 billion gallons. That is more than ten times the on-site figure. Add them and the 2023 load is about 228 billion gallons, not the tiny building number that Commerce Secretary Lutnick wants you to use. [6]
If someone says the building itself is not the problem, ask the next question. Who cools the power plant that keeps the servers running? That water still has to come from somewhere.
He Rigged the Cattle Comparison. The Devil is in the Details
When Lutnick says cattle use more water than data centers, he is using the smaller on-site number. He is not counting the power-plant water. That is the trick.
He takes the farm total, hides most of the data-center total, then pretends the buildings use no water at all. That is the deception. Not that farms use a lot of water. Everyone knows farms use a lot of water. The deception is using a national farm number to erase a local data-center number, and using only the water at the building so the comparison looks even safer.
Farms Feed People. Data Centers Don’t.
A billion gallons at one Iowa campus is not “nothing” to the utility that also serves homes and farms. Hundreds of millions of gallons in a small Oregon city is not “nothing” when that city is already fighting over reservoirs. Hundreds of thousands or millions of gallons a day in a dry basin is not “nothing” to the rancher or family on the same system.
Marjorie Taylor Green sarcastically stated: “How dare the peasants complain about data centers stealing their water and driving the cost of electricity!”[7]
Farms use water to grow food. Cattle use water so that we can put meat on the table. Data centers use building water plus power-plant water and give you no crop and no meal. They leave you with higher bills, tighter taps, and a machine built to watch you and take over your job. [8]
We Do Not Need More of These to Defend the Country.
We already have more than enough computing power for real defense work. The rush to build more data centers is not about feeding anyone and it is not about keeping the country safe. It is about building the machinery to watch law-abiding Americans, log where we go, what we buy, and what we say, then link the system to digital money so movement and spending can be tracked, traced, and controlled.[9]
Lutnick used water as a selling point when he said more jobs will be created. He denied the same water when local people started counting gallons. Then he hid the power-plant water to spin the cattle line.
According to a recent poll, seventy percent of Americans oppose data centers being built in their communities. These Americans have been labeled Luddites, leftists, or Communists by Lutnick, tech moguls, mainstream media and a few captured conservative media outlets. The data center pushers are the ones asking you to ignore the truth in the reports. They are the ones spreading propaganda.
Finally, Can We Stop Pretending We’re Losing the Data Center Race to China? – Welcome
[1] http://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/09/02/watch-cnbcs-full-interview-with-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick.html
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dS2fdTDPNs
[3] http://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/09/02/watch-cnbcs-full-interview-with-commerce-secretary-howard-lutnick.html
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/us/politics/howard-lutnick-jeffrey-epstein-island.html
https://glorytogodstudio.com/
[6] http://theconversation.com/data-centers-consume-massive-amounts-of-water-companies-rarely-tell-the-public-exactly-how-much-262901 and http://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-data-centers-water-use-901e2902
[7] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/how-much-water-data-centers-use/687934/
[9] https://glorytogodstudio.com/commentary/the-digital-noose-to-track-trace-and-database-every-citizen-of-the-united-states-is-accelerating-with-breakneck-speed/