Sub-Saharan Africa's Water — The AI Footprint Equals 1.3 Billion People

Consumptive, Which Is a Word That Means Gone

Water used to cool a server is not always stolen in the sense a prosecutor likes. Some of it is borrowed and returned warmer. Some of it is thrown at the sky and does not come back. The industry, when it is being careful, calls the second kind consumptive use. Consumptive is a word that sounds like a credit card. It is a disappearance.

The UN report said the water footprint associated with 2025 data-center electricity was about 4.5 trillion liters — 1.2 trillion gallons if you still think in the unit a garden hose understands. That number is not only the tower. It is the water hiding inside the power plant that made the watt, which is why a campus on a "dry" cooling design can still arrive with a river in its backpack. By 2030 the associated footprint, they said, could be 9.3 trillion liters, enough to cover the basic annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa.

I want you to hear what that comparison is and is not. It is not a claim that the water was taken from Lagos and poured on Ashburn. It is a claim about scale. A gallon used to evaporate heat is a gallon that is not available for a person, somewhere in the accounting of a finite planet. The accounting is ugly. The ugliness is the point.

Merritt said I should not put Africa in a chapter title. He said it was a metaphor that would get me a letter. I said the UN put Africa in the press release. He said the UN is allowed. I said I am allowed to repeat a public sentence. He wrote attribution and left it there.

WUE, PUE, and the Ratio That Lets You Sleep

PUE is power usage effectiveness: how much extra electricity the building drinks to keep the computers alive. A 1.2 is a brag. A 1.8 is a confession. WUE is the water cousin — liters per kilowatt-hour, or gallons per kilowatt-hour, depending on which country wrote the spec. I have sat in rooms where a WUE of "almost zero" was a standing ovation and a PUE that had gone up was a footnote. You can trade water for watts. You can trade watts for water. The slide shows the one you are proud of.

I asked a cooling vendor named Stefan, once, what his honest WUE was in July in Virginia. He said it depended on the wet-bulb. I said I was not a wet-bulb. He drew a curve on a napkin. The curve went up when the air was already wet, which is to say: the days a town wants its water most are the days a tower wants it most. I kept the napkin. Merritt told me to throw it away. I threw it away. I remember the curve.

Case File: The Dalles, Where a Gallon Became a Trade Secret

The Dalles, Oregon, sits on the Columbia and has a Google campus that does not look like a search bar. In 2021 and 2022 the city's largest newspaper asked how much water the campus used. The city said the number was a trade secret. Then the city sued the newspaper to keep the secret. That sentence is doing a lot of work. A government sued journalism to protect a company's thirst.

They settled in December 2022. The city turned over a decade of numbers and promised to honor future requests. Google, which had funded the fight, covered the city's legal bill — about $106,000 — and the $53,000 the city agreed to pay the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which had represented the paper. The records showed Google's local water use had roughly tripled since 2017 and was more than a quarter of the city's consumption. Google also, that season, began publishing site-level water numbers it had spent years calling a secret.

I am not going to pretend a settlement is a morality play. I am going to tell you the physics. A communal resource was reclassified as a competitive advantage. A town of about fifteen thousand people had already approved more halls before the council itself had the numbers. The orchards were still the biggest users, which is a sentence companies love, and which does not make a quarter of a city's water a rounding error.

I drove through The Dalles on a trip I will not romanticize. I bought a coffee. I looked at the river. The river did not look like a trade secret. I did not take a photograph of a building. I took a photograph of the coffee, which is the only souvenir Merritt would allow.

The Photographer of Water, Who Is a Reporter

I had lunch with a reporter who had spent a year asking utilities for numbers and getting PDFs with the important cell blacked out. He paid. He does not like salad either. He said the black cell was the product. He said FOIA was a hobby for people who still believed a gallon had a civic life. I said The Dalles had proved it. He said The Dalles had proved it once, in one state, after thirteen months, and that the next town had already learned the phrase critical energy infrastructure. I said that phrase was a cousin of trade secret. He said the cousin had better lawyers.

Walking out I passed a hydrant. The hydrant had a chain. I thought about the napkin. I did not text the reporter. There is nothing useful to say to a person whose beat is a black cell.

600 Million Liters for a Training Run

The UN authors put about 600 million liters on GPT-4's training — enough, they said, for the minimum annual domestic needs of 81,000 people in Sub-Saharan Africa, or 237 Olympic pools if you prefer a sport. I do not prefer a sport. I prefer the 81,000, because a pool is a joke and a person is a bill.

That number is associated water, again: the plant that made the watt, the tower that ate the heat. It is also an estimate of a run that already happened. The run is not coming back. The next run will be larger or more efficient or both, which is the Jevons sentence again. I am not going to give you a per-query ounce. Per-query ounces are how a company says see, it's just a sip while the sip happens a billion times.

Inez asked why a sentence needed a lake. I said the sentence was easy. The lake was the hard part we hid in a ratio.

Microsoft in the Netherlands, and the Feeling of a License

I am putting the Netherlands here because it is the other grown-up flinch. Dutch municipalities and water boards started treating new halls as a permit problem, not a ribbon-cutting. Drought years made the problem impolite. A campus that had been a brag became a hearing. I will not reconstruct every provincial fight. I will say that a water board is a beautiful institution if you have one, and that most American counties have a board that does something else.

A Dutch colleague emailed me a sentence I have kept: We are done being a climate for other people's models. I did not reply, because a reply would have become a kit. I am putting the sentence here, without his name, because the sentence is the chapter.

Uruguay, Briefly, Without a Brochure

Google also looked at Uruguay — a campus near Montevideo that became a fight about a drought and a pipeline and a country that sells water as a right in its constitution. The details moved. The feeling did not. A constitution is not a WUE. I am not going to pretend I litigated it. I am going to say that the Southern Cone has already taught the industry a word it did not want: no.

What a Tower Does, Without Instructions

I am not going to give you a design. I am going to give you the kitchen version. Heat leaves a chip. A fluid takes the heat. If you evaporate a little of the fluid, the rest gets colder. The little that left is the thirst. If you do not evaporate, you must dump the heat into air or a river that is already tired. There is no third magic. There is only a slide that says innovative.

The vendor's napkin had that curve because physics is not a press release. I threw the napkin away. I kept the physics.

1.2 Trillion Gallons, Held for a Minute

I am going to hold the 2025 number again, because a chapter that mentions Africa and Oregon and a napkin can lose the gallon. 4.5 trillion liters. 1.2 trillion gallons. The AP wrote it as the water associated with making the campuses' electricity last year, enough to be a weather event if it fell as rain in the wrong place. It did not fall. It was used, in plants and towers, and a lot of it left as vapor.

Vapor is not a crime. Vapor is a phase. A phase becomes a crime when the basin is already in court. I am not asking you to arrest a cloud. I am asking you to stop calling a cloud a partnership.

The Oregonian, Mike Rogoway, and Thirteen Months

I am going to name the reporter because the docket already did. Mike Rogoway asked. The city sued him. The Reporters Committee stood up. Thirteen months later a gallon was a number again. I have used newspapers as villains in other moods. This mood, the newspaper was the only adult in a town that had a company for a lawyer.

Ellen Osoinach, the RCFP attorney, said the information was of the highest public interest because the West was in a drought and a communal resource was not a recipe. I am not going to improve her sentence. I am going to put it next to the $159,000 Google effectively put on the table to fund a secrecy and then a surrender. Money is how you measure how badly a company wanted a black cell.

Mayor Richard Mays said Google had been worried competitors would learn how they cool. I believe him. I also believe a cooling design that cannot survive a monthly total is not a design. It is a mood.

550 Million, Which I Will Not Swear To

Later coverage has put Google's The Dalles use in 2025 in the neighborhood of 550 million gallons, approaching two-fifths of the city. I have not held that spreadsheet. I am leaving it as later coverage, not as a number I will tattoo on a chapter title. The 2022 settlement numbers are the ones I will swear to: tripled since 2017, more than a quarter of the town. If 2025 is worse, the town already has the tool to say so. That was the point of the suit. A tool is not a gallon returned. A tool is a later room with a light on.

Closed Loop, Open Mouth

A vendor sold us "zero water" for a quarter and then, in a footnote, "excluding the power plant." I said the footnote was the product. He said every product has a boundary. I said I had drawn the boundary and I was not proud. He offered a case study. I offered him the door. Merritt would have liked the door.

Zero water is air cooling plus a prayer plus a plant that still drinks. I will take the air. I will not take the prayer.

The Orchard and the Quarter

The Dalles' orchards still used more water than Google when the first numbers came out. Companies love that sentence. I love it less. A cherry is a product you can eat. A query is a product you can forget. Both drink. Only one gets a tax abatement that looks like a love letter. The farmer I owed a sentence already told you the brochure uses his blossoms. The blossoms are not a permission slip for a quarter of a town.

Canelones, Salt in the Tap, a Redesign That Counted

Uruguay had the worst drought in seventy-four years when Google's Teros project became a national argument. Montevideo mixed brackish water into the drinking system. A child asked a president why the water was salty. That sentence did more than a sustainability report. The original cooling plan, pulled into daylight by a legal ask, was on the order of 7.6 million liters of potable water a day — a domestic day's worth for tens of thousands of people — from the public system, on land in Canelones. People said pillage. I am not going to improve the noun.

Google later made the project smaller and switched the cooling to air, to chillers, to a design that was supposed to stop drinking the tap for the heat. Uruguay's environment ministry approved the reformulated project in 2024. Construction stories followed that summer. Later coverage put an $850 million sticker and a yearly electricity appetite under 560 gigawatt-hours, with a utility agreement for a first slice. I have not held the Uruguayan file. I am leaving the sticker as later coverage. I will swear to the sequence: drought, salt, a number that sounded like a city, a redesign, an approval that came after the no had been said out loud.

A constitution that treats water as a right is not a WUE. I said that already in a thinner sentence. I am saying it at length because a right is how a country tells a campus it is not a special customer. The United States has rights and also has rate classes. The rate class usually wins.

I talked to a person who had family in Montevideo that year. She said the bottles became furniture. I said I knew about furniture. She said I did not know about salt. She was right. I have never had to decide whether a tap was a meal. I have only had to decide whether a campus was a neighbor. Those are not the same thirst. I am not going to collapse them to make a chapter tidy.

Hamina, the Other Temperature

Google's Hamina site in Finland is the brochure's favorite cousin: seawater, a cold coast, a story about using what the Baltic already has. I will give the cousin its due. A hall that can dump heat into a cold sea is a different animal than a hall that evaporates a desert canal. The animal is still a hall. The sea is still a commons. I am in favor of siting that uses a temperature the weather already paid for. I am not in favor of a brochure that uses Hamina to perfume Arizona.

A vendor put Hamina and The Dalles on the same slide under innovation. I said they were different hydrologies. He said the brand was one brand. I said the brand was not a watershed. He wrote watershed as if I had invented a metric. I had not. I had named a fact.

The Footnote That Excludes the River

I want to stay with the vendor's "zero water, excluding the power plant" for one more page, because the footnote is the whole industry in eight words. Closed-loop on a campus can be honest. Closed-loop plus a gas plant up the road is a costume. The UN's 4.5 trillion liters is trying, clumsily, to put the plant back in the sentence. Clumsy is allowed. Costume is not.

Merritt asked me to define consumptive again, as if I might have improved it. I said evaporates. He said then say evaporates in the chapter title. I said the chapter title was already a continent. He said continents are how you hide a tap. He was in a mood. I wrote gone in the margin of the UN printout and left it.

1.3 Billion, Which Is a Moral and Not a Headcount I Met

The UN's 9.3 trillion liters as a year of basic domestic need for 1.3 billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa is a sentence that can become a poster. I am allergic to posters. I am using the sentence anyway because the alternative is a liter that has no face. I have not been to the fifteen countries a person would have to visit to make the sentence honest as travel. I have been to rooms that used Africa as a rounding error and rooms that used Africa as a hymn. Both rooms were in American buildings. Both rooms had leaves.

A colleague who had actually worked on water systems — not credits, pipes — told me to stop using the continent as a multiplier. I said the UN had used it. He said then use it once and stop leaning. I have used it in a title. I am using it here as a warning to myself. A multiplier is not a person. A person has a tap that works some days. The model has a tap that works because a county said yes. Those are not the same tap. I will not collapse them. I will let them sit in the same chapter and refuse the poster.

Claudia, the Stay I Owe a Longer Chair

I named Claudia Fuentes because the coverage did, and because a neighbor who stays after a municipality leaves is the rare character this industry cannot hire. I have not interviewed her. I will not invent her kitchen. I will invent the meeting where a lawyer said Latin America was manageable, because I was in that meeting, and the word is still in my ear.

Manageable means the lawsuit is a cost. Unmanageable means a person who will not take a settlement that is a leaf. Cerrillos became unmanageable for a season: a court that put climate change back on an aquifer, a withdrawal, an old qualification killed, a promise of air. Promises are later rooms. Staying is this room. I am putting the stay in the water chapter because an aquifer is a thirst and a neighbor is how you hear it.

I asked Merritt whether a stay was an accounting event. He said only if it changed a cash flow. I said it changed a design. He said designs are not books until they are invoices. He was right about his job. I am right about mine. The invoice is Chapter 10. The stay is why a later invoice might be air instead of 169 liters a second.