(Investigate Midwest) 1. They use enormous amounts of water

Data centers, which store and process the digital information needed for everyday online activities, often consume large amounts of water to keep servers cool — especially the new hyperscale facilities typically built for artificial intelligence (AI).

Google's data center in Pryor, Oklahoma — one of the company's largest facilities — uses about 1.1 billion gallons of water each year. That is equal to about 8.3 billion water bottles or the annual water use of 10,000 average American households.

The Pryor data center uses an evaporative cooling system, so most of the water used for cooling is lost to evaporation. Of the 1.1 billion gallons of water used, only about 275 million gallons of drinking water are discharged back into the river for reuse.