Is AI really using up our water and electricity?
Your own use of AI is tiny: about a teaspoon of water and under two minutes of television a day. The buildings are big, and the worries about your electric bill and your town's water are fair questions. Each one is answered below, plainly.
Made by one personNo fundingEvery number sourcedWho made this?
One person, on their own time. No company, utility or advocacy group paid for it, asked for it, or has seen it. Every number is a link to where it came from, so you can check it, and the Check the work page shows the arithmetic.
First, what's true in the worry.
Your electric bill can go up. A very large new customer needs new power lines and sometimes new power plants, and someone pays for them. More below.
A town's water can be strained. It depends almost entirely on how the building is cooled. More below.
The total is growing fast. All US datacenters together used about 4.4% of the country's electricity in 2023, about four cents of every dollar (176 TWh), and are projected to use more than three times that by 2030 (649 TWh).
None of that is made up. Now, how big is each piece?
Question 1
Does AI use a lot of water?
A whole day of asking AI questions uses about one teaspoon.
That counts the datacenter and the electricity it runs on. Here it is beside things you did today.
One flush uses more water than three years of asking AI questions.
Question 2
Does AI use a lot of electricity?
A whole day of asking AI questions uses as much as your TV does in a minute and a half.
That's where this site gets its name. Here it is beside things you did today.
Charging your phone tonight uses more electricity than five days of AI questions.
Show me how that was worked out
A "day of AI" here is four questions, which is typical. Google measured its own AI and said one question is "less than nine seconds of TV"; this site uses the same television, a 96-watt set, as its ruler. The day comes to 2.42 Wh of electricity and 1.1 teaspoons of water. Measured against the television, the electricity is 91 seconds of it, and the water it takes to make that electricity is 112 seconds. Both are under two minutes, which is where the name comes from. The long version walks through every comparison, and Check the work shows the arithmetic and the source for each number.
Question 3
Then why are the buildings so big?
Because one building serves an enormous number of people at once.
In this site's model, one large AI datacenter could answer the daily questions of about a billion people (≈1.19 billion users a day). It is big for the same reason a power plant or a water-treatment plant is big: one large one serving a whole region wastes less than a small one in every neighborhood.
And they aren't only for AI. The same kind of building already runs your email, your bank, your streaming, and the website you order from. If you've bought something online today, a datacenter handled it.
But big in one place is exactly why the next two questions matter. A teaspoon each, for a billion people, all drawn from one town, is a real thing for that town.
Does bigger really waste less?
For every 100 units of electricity the computers use, the largest modern buildings spend about 8 to 12 more on cooling and everything else. The industry average spends about 52. Engineers call this number PUE: 1.08 to 1.12 PUE for the largest operators against 1.52 PUE for the industry.
Question 4
Will it raise my electric bill?
It can. This is the fairest worry on the list.
A building this size needs new power lines, new substations, and sometimes new power plants. Somebody pays for them. Whether that is the datacenter's owner or every household on the system is decided by your state's utility commission, in the rates it approves.
The evidence points both ways, and it depends on where you live. Virginia's own auditor found datacenters pay their full costs today, and projected that a typical household's bill could be $14 to $37 a month higher by 2040 as demand grows. That is $168 to $444 a year. In the mid-Atlantic power grid, the independent monitor ties about 46.2% of recent charges for keeping enough power plants available to datacenter demand. Yet a national lab found that, so far, states where electricity use grew fastest generally saw prices fall slightly after inflation (by 0.6 cents/kWh for every 10% more use).
For proportion: household electricity prices across the country rose about 32% from 2020 to 2025, mostly to pay for aging power plants and lines, not datacenters. Virginia's regulator approved a $11.24 a month rise for 2026 on its own. Datacenters are one reason bills go up, not the only one, and which reason costs you most depends on the rules in your state.
Since 2025, Ohio, Indiana, Georgia and Virginia have adopted rules that make very large customers sign long contracts and pay their own way. More states are deciding now.
What to ask, if one is proposed near you
- Does the datacenter pay for the new lines and substations it needs, or does everyone?
- Is it billed under its own rate, separate from households?
- Who pays for what was built if it shuts down or leaves?
Question 5
Will it drain my town's water?
It depends on how the building is cooled. There are two ways.
The old way: boil it off. Water carries the heat away by evaporating, like sweat. It works well and uses water every day, sometimes a lot.
The newer way: a sealed loop. The same water circulates in closed pipes, like the coolant in a car, and is never used up. Fans blow the heat into the air. It uses almost no water, and more electricity.
The difference is large. One company reports a building that uses 140× more water than another of its own, same computers, different cooling and climate. Many new buildings are choosing the sealed loop, and some places now insist on it: the water authority for the Las Vegas area has banned evaporative cooling at new datacenters, and Singapore's target for its datacenters is 2 liters of water for each kilowatt-hour of computing, about half a gallon, or less.
How a datacenter works shows the whole building in six short steps.
What to ask, if one is proposed near you
- Which kind of cooling will it use?
- How many gallons a day, at the hottest time of year, and from where?
In short.
Your own AI use is a teaspoon of water and under two minutes of television a day. That part of the worry is much smaller than you've heard.
The buildings are big because they serve a great many people, and the fair questions about them are local: who pays for the power lines, and how the building is cooled. Those have real answers, and you're entitled to ask.