Can Utah become a data center hub without draining its water supply?

Note to readers •This story is made possible through a partnership between The Salt Lake Tribune and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

In late September, Gov. Spencer Cox stood on the shores of the drying Great Salt Lake, flanked by top legislative leaders and wealthy developers as he unveiled a new partnership he said could help refill Utah’s iconic inland sea in time for the 2034 Winter Olympics.

The lake needs to rise by more than six feet to reach a minimum healthy elevation, a goal that environmental advocates say would require years of substantially increased water flows.

At the same time, Utah’s elected leaders have pushed for the state to be a hub for data centers, facilities that for decades have relied on large amounts of water to keep their servers cool. Since 2021, Utah has added or announced plans for at least 15 new data center buildings or campuses, according to Data Center Map, and at least a few existing facilities grew their footprints over that time.

Asked by The Salt Lake Tribune how Cox squared those traditionally water-intensive industries with his Great Salt Lake goals, the governor appeared steamed.

“Most of the data centers do not consume water. This is a big misnomer out there,” Cox said in response.

He warned of rising electricity prices across the nation. He also praised nuclear energy and its ability to power desalination plants, which could someday free up an “abundance” of water in the world’s oceans. State leaders like Cox have also warned of a new global “arms race” over who will ultimately control artificial intelligence technologies and the energy they need.

“If you tell people, ‘I’m sorry, you’re just not going to have any energy for the things that we need. We’re just going to have to give up and let China rule the world, because we can’t create energy because it uses some water,’” the governor continued, “that’s crazy talk.”

On the Wasatch Front, tax incentives paved the way for mammoth data campuses like the one run by Meta, the tech company behind Facebook and Instagram. The rise of AI has spurred even more demand for the thirsty and energy-intensive campuses.

“Water is extremely cheap,” said Wes Swenson, CEO of Novva, which operates a data center campus in West Jordan. “And cities have generally accommodated that.”

It remains to be seen whether the governor’s assurances for the state will be reflected on the ground, or in a rising Great Salt Lake. How much water those campuses actually use can vary dramatically, a question at least one Utah lawmaker says needs closer scrutiny in the coming legislative session.

A new bill sponsored by Rep. Jill Koford (R-Ogden) would require data centers to report their water use to the state, and that information would then be aggregated and released publicly without identifying individual facilities.

Koford said this has been, for her and others, cause for concern.

The lawmaker agreed with Cox: Some new data centers are using water resources more responsibly, but some legacy facilities, she added, “not so much.”

“We really don’t have any statewide guardrails for reporting and transparency,” Koford said.

How much water are data centers consuming?

The Tribune requested records from the municipal water providers for all known data centers across the state and found that several Utah data centers are siphoning away vasts amount of water. The NSA data center in Bluffdale consumed more than 126 million gallons between October 2024 and September 2025. That’s around 390 acre-feet, or enough water to meet the annual indoor needs of nearly 800 Utah households.

Aligned data centers used 80 million gallons in West Valley and 47.4 million gallons in West Jordan over the same period, and the eBay data center in South Jordan used 19.5 million gallons.

But true to Cox’s assertion, some newer facilities use far less. The DataBank Granite Point campus in Bluffdale used a combined 7.7 million gallons over a 12-month period, just a fraction of the water used by the nearby NSA facility, even though the DataBank campus includes multiple buildings and has 2.5 times more data center space.

Koford’s data center bill “is in line with what we do with other large water users,” she said. “It’s such a new and emerging industry that we need to have a handle on it.”

In recent years, communities across the country have begun pushing back on data centers over concerns about scarce water resources and rising energy costs. In 2022, Salt Lake City, Utah’s capital, adopted an ordinance barring industries that use more than 200,000 gallons a day. The law wasn’t meant to target data centers specifically, said Laura Briefer, the city’s director of public utilities. But officials saw a rise in proposals for all kinds of water-intensive businesses, like bottling facilities.

“We all just stepped back to say, is this appropriate in the Great Salt Lake basin?” Briefer said.

Around $64 billion worth of data center projects nationwide were blocked by local bipartisan backlash in 2024, according to a report by Data Center Watch. Almost a third of the country’s data centers lie in areas with high or extremely high water stress, including parts of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and California.

“We need good leadership and good governance,” said Kirsten James, a water expert with Ceres, an environmental nonprofit that advises investors and asset managers, “... so we don’t wipe out the gains we have made, like water efficiency, over the years.”

James led a study of data centers in Arizona that found companies and communities aren’t accounting for data centers’ full water toll.

“We need to think about the solutions holistically,” James said, “ to really ensure we’re managing every drop of water in the most strategic way.”

As demand for data centers surged in recent years, some companies have adopted technologies like closed-loop cooling systems, or water recycling, to lessen their impacts. While the updated systems can save water, Koford noted that the trade-off is massive electricity consumption.

“There’s a balance there,” she said.

That energy demand devours a lot of water, too. It takes billions of gallons every year to run Utah’s fossil fuel-fired power plants, and industries use immense volumes of water to extract resources like coal and natural gas as well.

“Data centers are using water. That is the current state of affairs,” James said. “Some may be using water more efficiently … but not everyone is undertaking that best practice.”

Questions of transparency

In West Jordan, the Novva data center covers 1.5 million square feet. It consumed 3 million gallons over a year, public utility records show. Two-thirds of that water was used on landscaping.

“I’ve lived here in Utah my whole life,” said Swenson, Novva’s CEO, “so I’m keenly aware of the long-term drought combined with population growth.”

His Utah campus used 55,000 gallons to fill up a recirculated pipe cooling system a single time, he said. Had he used evaporative cooling instead, Swenson estimates his campus would use around 250 million gallons per year. But he acknowledged Novva’s cooling system requires more energy to run.

“We think the tradeoffs for a water-free system are worth it,” Swenson said, because his clients demand it and reliance on water in a drought-stricken region creates a business risk.

No matter how the centers are using water, Koford said her bill gives companies a chance to tell their side of the story — to prove that they can be the partners state leaders hope they will be.

“If they’re truly using water wisely, then my bill is a no big deal for them,” Koford said. “If you’re using a lot of water, tell us how you’re using it. Tell us how you’re recharging the system.”

The Meta data center in Eagle Mountain has vowed to be a responsible steward of the planet’s natural resources. But in November 2024, the city inked an agreement with the tech giant to keep the 4.5 million square-foot facility’s water use confidential, city officials confirmed. Eagle Mountain also agreed to alert Meta whenever someone requested its records.

Koford said she’s heard from both Eagle Mountain and Meta about her proposed legislation, and that neither is thrilled by it.

“That’s fine,” she said of the pushback, noting that the public release of the information will be anonymized. “This is about getting a handle on this from the state level.”

Meta declined to provide an interview for this story, but pointed The Tribune to its sustainability reports. The company’s most recent environmental data noted the Eagle Mountain campus withdrew more than 35 million gallons in 2024 — more than double the amount of water it used in 2021. It also used more than 1 million megawatt-hours of electricity, nearly five times more energy than it tapped three years before.

The city and state offered significant incentives to attract the tech giant, including 100% tax exemption on personal property and an 80% break on real property for 20 years. A sales tax perk adopted by state lawmakers could save Meta an additional $5.8 million. But the company committed a $100 million investment for building up roads and utilities to spur more development on Utah County’s west side.

Jared Gray, the city’s new mayor, said data centers like Meta provide big benefits. Even with the tax breaks, he said the city gets much-needed revenue from both property taxes and sales tax on the data center’s energy use.

“It’s literally what funds our general fund,” Gray said.

Gray was not aware of the city’s deal to keep Meta’s water use private. He dismissed the idea that the campus uses a significant amount.

“It’s safe to say it’s a lot less than they own,” Gray said.

The Utah Division of Water Rights confirmed that Meta and its affiliates do not “own” any water rights in the area. It instead purchases water through the city.

A boon for rural Utah?

In Millard County, officials are banking on data centers as an economic engine in rural Utah. The massive Joule Capital Partners data center campus has rights to more than 10,000 acre-feet of groundwater — meaning it can use more than 3 billion gallons per year, without relying on a city or public water system. The property includes more than 4,000 acres and is still primarily agricultural land, but plans for just its first phase call for 32 buildings covering a million square feet each.

Mark McDougal, the property owner and a managing partner of Joule, said his data complex will use closed-loop cooling systems to lower the site’s water needs.

“It would be disingenuous for anyone to say that a data center uses zero water,” McDougal said. But, he added, “they use far less water than golf courses or park strips or city parks.”

The 150-acre Sand Hollow Resort in Hurricane uses the most water of any golf course in southern Utah, a 2023 Tribune investigation found. It consumed 943 acre-feet in a year, or 307 million gallons.

Joule broke ground on its sprawling campus in November. An equally huge data center is also in the works a few miles away, in Delta. Eagle Mountain has approved another five data centers within its own boundaries, including a 300-acre site owned by Google and a QTS facility currently under construction. Until all the campuses come online, it’s difficult to know their full water demands, or whether they’ll live up to promises made about having neutral to beneficial impacts on the communities that host them.

Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University and founder of Grow the Flow, a movement to refill the Great Salt Lake, said data center water demand still pales in comparison to the water consumed by lawns and agriculture in arid Utah.

“This is something that we should pay attention to,” Abbott said, “but it’s not something that should start our hair on fire.”

Replacing thirsty alfalfa fields with server racks, as Joule plans to do in Millard County, could even have a net benefit, he said. But the only way to know for sure is to collect data on the data centers themselves.

And as the legislative session approaches, Koford said that is precisely her goal.

“We live in a desert,” she added. “Let’s be smart about how we use our water.”

Correction 12:10 p.m., Jan. 12: This story has been updated to remove inaccurate information on how the QTS data center will be powered.