Can recycled water cool AI data centers? A joke points to a real infrastructure challenge

A Liquid Death advertising campaign with former Philadelphia Eagles player Jason Kelce jokes that people should donate their urine to cool AI data centers. The premise is deliberately absurd, but TechCrunch reports that it points toward a real engineering and policy question: how can the industry reduce its demand for potable water as computing facilities grow?

The practical answer is not to pour urine into a cooling tower. Water-reuse experts quoted by TechCrunch explain that wastewater and sewage can be treated into recycled water for industrial use. Treatment can involve membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light and other processes. The resulting water can replace at least part of the drinking-water supply used by data centers, while avoiding the salts, urea, bacteria and organic matter that would create deposits and maintenance problems in untreated urine.

Michael Obradovitch of Ecolab, Bruno Pigott of the WateReuse Association and Greta Zornes of CDM Smith told TechCrunch that recycled water is already used for industrial cooling and that interest in data-center projects is rising. Zornes said the main limitation is infrastructure: a facility needs to be close enough to a wastewater treatment plant with sufficient capacity. Rural locations may not have systems large enough to treat and deliver the required volume.

The scale is visible in Loudoun County, Virginia. TechCrunch cites Loudoun Water data showing that data centers used about 200 million gallons of recycled water per day in 2025, but that this represented only 43 percent of their daily water use. The remaining 57 percent, or about 260 million gallons, came from potable supplies. The figures describe one region, not every data center, but they show why cooling choices have become a community and planning issue.

For AI companies, cloud providers and their customers, the implication is concrete: compute capacity depends on local water infrastructure as well as chips, electricity and buildings. Recycled water can reduce pressure on drinking-water systems, but it requires capital, treatment capacity, local coordination and time. TechCrunch also reports that Meta plans to invest at least $270 million in wastewater infrastructure near its data centers, while WateReuse advocates a 30 percent tax credit for industrial reuse projects. Those proposals do not remove the trade-offs, but they show how AI growth is making water reuse part of infrastructure policy. The campaign’s joke therefore lands on a serious point: data-center sustainability depends on systems that are built before the servers arrive.