A typical data center draws roughly as much water each day as a city of 30,000–50,000 people, according to Texas Tech's Water Resources Center. GTG's clustered Atmospheric Water Generator farms give data centers and network operations centers an independent, on-site water supply for cooling and operations — decoupled from a municipal system that's already under strain.
More than 5,300 U.S. communities already struggle with polluted or lead-impacted water infrastructure. The Colorado River basin — which supplies the corridor between Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego, home to roughly 23 million people — is at historic low water levels with no assured replenishment.
Los Angeles has committed to recycling 100% of its wastewater by 2035 to cut reliance on imported water. GTG's AWG farms complement that shift by generating new, atmosphere-sourced water on-site rather than drawing further on strained regional supplies.
A single data center's cooling and operational water demand can be met by clustering multiple AWG units into a farm — scaled the same way as an agricultural deployment, from a single 500L unit up to a 10,000L industrial substation array.
| Facility Type | Typical Need | Recommended Configuration |
|---|---|---|
| Edge / Micro Data Center | Hundreds of gallons/day | 500L–1000L units |
| Regional Data Center | Thousands of gallons/day | Clustered 2000L–5000L units |
| Hyperscale / NOC Campus | Tens of thousands of gallons/day | 10,000L substation arrays |
A closer look at where data center water actually comes from today — and the case for an independent, atmosphere-sourced supply.
A data center is the technological hub of modern enterprise operations, delivering the IT resources and services that businesses, partners and customers rely on worldwide. Running that infrastructure at scale demands a dedicated space engineered around four needs: power, cooling, security and management.
The power delivered to a data center becomes computing work — and heat. Removing that heat with conventional HVAC systems demands large quantities of non-potable water. Vendor cooling-loop specs typically call for clean, bacteria-free water (under 100 CFU/mL) such as demineralized, reverse osmosis, deionized or distilled water, filtered to 50 microns.
An $800 million data center approved in Mesa, Arizona was projected to need up to 1.25 million gallons of water daily to keep servers from overheating — during the region's driest 12-month stretch in 126 years.
Hyperscale data centers roughly doubled between 2015 and 2020, with about 40% located in the U.S. and Amazon, Google and Microsoft accounting for over half of the total.
Training modern AI models consumes enormous water volumes for cooling — Microsoft reported 700,000 liters used training GPT-3, and Meta reported 22 million liters training its LLaMA-3 model, per Washington Post reporting.
According to Venkatesh Uddameri, professor and director of the Water Resources Center at Texas Tech University, a typical data center's daily water use is comparable to that of a city of 30,000–50,000 people. Big tech's own sustainability commitments — like Amazon's pledge to be "water positive" by 2030 — look further out than the water these facilities are drawing today.
GTG's case study on data center water sourcing, municipal strain, and the AWG farm alternative.
Watch the VideoBeyond water, GTG's PTE Turbofan platform provides off-grid green energy power for data centers and network operations centers — pairing with AWG farms for a facility that's independent of both municipal water and the utility grid.
The full business case for off-grid data center power and water, covering the technology, deployment model, and economics.
Watch the PTE Turbofan Video
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