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Americans across multiple states are being urged to conserve water as drought conditions intensify, reservoirs shrink, and utilities issue increasingly urgent warnings. At the same time, a different kind of consumer is quietly demanding unprecedented amounts of water: artificial intelligence.
The collision between worsening drought and the AI boom is raising alarms among environmental experts, utility operators, and local governments as hyperscale data centers consume hundreds of millions of gallons of water to cool the servers powering chatbots, image generators, and AI search tools.
