In his July 26, 2026, New York Times guest essay, "The Environmental Case Against Data Centers Is Misguided," Adam Mastroianni argues that opposition to data centers is driven by our contempt for tech billionaires cloaked in environmental concerns — a diagnosis I find persuasive.
But he undercuts his own case with statistics, citing several such comparisons — among them, an estimate of approximately 100 billion gallons per year for data centers — and arguing that, even if their water use increases substantially, it will remain minuscule compared with the several trillion gallons per year Americans use to keep grass green.
Comparing data centers with every lawn in the United States does not answer the environmental question confronting a community: How much water demand will be concentrated at this site, and can the surrounding aquifer, watershed, and municipal water system sustain it?
Water-Use Intensity (WUI), the gallons of water used per square foot per year, is the relevant metric to guide development decisions. WUI measures density of the water usage, the concentration of water demand.
Residential landscapes have a rough national WUI of approximately 2 gallons per square foot per year. A data center has a WUI of approximately 87 gallons per square foot per year. That is more than forty times the water-use intensity of residential landscape irrigation. That concentration matters because local water systems — well fields, reservoirs, treatment plants — have finite capacity, and one large new draw at a single site can strain that ceiling in a way dispersed residential use across a region does not.
Imagine a bird's-eye map of the United States in which every parcel is shaded according to its WUI. Residential lawns would appear as broad regions of low demand density. Data centers would appear as scattered spikes. The map would show a landscape of low average demand interrupted by intense, geographically concentrated industrial loads.
"Lawns use more" is not an environmental analysis. It is a diversion from the location and concentration of the new demand. Lawns collectively use more water because they cover tens of millions of acres. Data centers occupy a minuscule fraction of that area.
WUI should become a standard disclosure in zoning applications, development agreements, water-service requests, and environmental reviews. The development approval decision should hinge on the question: Can the watershed, aquifer, and municipal system surrounding this high-intensity site sustain the demand concentrated there?
Don Scipione, Ph.D., is the founder of Roll-A-Rack, a Cleveland technology company that designs rainwater-managing solar-racking systems. His water-conservation interest developed over the past five years, following earlier careers in elementary particle physics and optimization software development.