Why Data Centers Water and Electricity Use Are Continuing to Increase | SoCal Matters

Our Take

Credit to PBS SoCal and reporter Alejandro Lazo for putting numbers behind what a lot of Californians already suspect: the data center boom isn't just a Texas or Virginia story, it's happening in our own backyard, and it's accelerating fast. Electricity use and emissions nearly doubling in a few years is a staggering trend for any single sector, but the water figure is the real gut-punch here. Water is the resource Californians have fought droughts over for decades, and now it's being quietly funneled into cooling systems for server farms with almost no public accounting of how much, or where it's coming from.

The transparency problem is the crux of it all. Researchers can't measure what utilities and companies won't disclose, and lawmakers who could mandate that disclosure have let oversight bills die or stall. That's not an accident — it's the result of industry lobbying and a political class that's more excited about "AI economic development" ribbon-cuttings than about asking who pays when the water table drops or the grid gets stressed. Every one of these facilities got a permit, a tax break, or a utility interconnection agreement signed by somebody. Those names and those deals deserve daylight.

This is exactly the kind of pattern we track at GridWatch — the gap between splashy announcements and the actual bills, water draws, and land use dumped on host communities. Check our facility map to see what's operating or proposed near you, and if you want to push for the kind of disclosure this report says is missing, visit our take-action page to find out how.