The House Committee on Energy and Commerce will weigh in on legislation to address water use by data centers as public backlash against artificial intelligence facilities grows.
The committee plans to hold a hearing on Thursday, Sept. 3, to discuss a draft of the Water Cost Accountability Act, which is aimed at ensuring communities do not bear costs from data center water consumption or infrastructure, a committee spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
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“While data centers consume a fraction of the water of many other industries and have proven that new technologies are actually reducing new water consumption, nonetheless, Americans should have confidence that data center developers are acting responsibly with local water supplies,” Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) said in a statement.
“The Water Cost Accountability Act is an important step toward safeguarding our nation’s drinking water and determining whether there are new costs associated with additional water demand,” Guthrie added.
The draft bill would allow states receiving grants from State Revolving Loan Funds to prohibit public water systems from charging customers additional costs for data centers connecting to the public water system or for expanding their infrastructure. Those costs would instead have to be recovered from the data center’s owner or operator.
It would also require the Environmental Protection Agency to provide a report to Congress on the sources of water used by “qualified data centers,” which are defined as data centers whose intake exceeds 200,000 gallons per day on average.
Members of the public have increasingly expressed concern about the strain data centers place on local resources such as water and electricity. In April, a Gallup poll found that 50% of people opposed to data center construction cited the impact on resources, including water, energy, farmland, and forests.
Data centers consume water directly for cooling their computer servers and indirectly for electric power. The amount of water used by a data center depends on several factors, including the facility size, cooling technology, local climate, and data center type.
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U.S. data centers in 2014 directly consumed 21 billion liters of water. By 2023, total water use had grown to 66 billion liters, according to a 2024 Berkeley Lab report. The report found that hyperscale data centers are expected to consume between 60 billion and 124 billion liters of water by 2028.
The data center water bill is similar to the bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act, which was unanimously voted out of committee in July and aims to ensure that households do not bear the cost of energy consumed by data centers.
