By Carol Thompson, cthompson@detroitnews.com
Mason Mayor Russell Whipple wants to know what data centers could mean for the water supply of his Ingham County city of about 8,000.
Mason is not one of the 15-plus communities in Michigan that have been publicly approached by data center developers — so far. But city leaders want to be prepared to regulate data centers if they ever come to town.
The water supply is one thing the city can control through its water and wastewater system. Mason hired a firm to study its aquifer, water infrastructure, current water needs and available land to determine how much it could offer to a data center.
“Our thinking is, if somebody does come in, we would basically say, ‘This is how much water you can have. You can’t have any more because if you do that, you’re going to rob it from everybody else and all of the other developable land,’” Whipple said.
Water experts agree Michigan community leaders should think carefully about their water supplies, especially if they draw from underground aquifers instead of the Great Lakes. About half of the people in Michigan drink groundwater, said Mike Shriberg, director of the University of Michigan Water Center, which conducts water research to help policymakers.
Although nestled among four of the five Great Lakes, Michigan’s water supply is vulnerable to a changing economy and world, Shriberg said. Data center development is an important factor, as is climate change and the re-embrace of fossil fuels and nuclear power.
In the Midwest, the warmer climate is dumping precipitation in more intense storms but less often. That means there’s more drought, as parts of Michigan experienced last year, and more floods, such as those that swept through Metro Detroit in 2021. Farmers’ irrigation needs will increase because of the developments, Shriberg said, adding to what already drives most of the state’s water consumption.
In addition, data center development and a resurgence of coal, natural gas and nuclear power production are “really massive shifts” that stand to affect Michigan’s prized natural resource, Shriberg said.
“All of a sudden, we’ve got a water usage issue that this region is not particularly prepared for,” he said.
Report sees water conflicts
Data center developers turned toward Michigan last year, proposing to build at least 15 of the facilities that house computing equipment to power the internet and artificial intelligence research. While supporters said the facilities will bring tax revenue, tech companies and construction jobs, opponents are concerned a glut of new data centers would raise electric bills, increase fossil fuel use and change rural communities.
Data centers’ water use is another concern for opponents and water experts. In August, the Chicago nonprofit Alliance for the Great Lakes released a report projecting a future in which the Great Lakes region could face water shortages, groundwater conflicts and contaminated aquifers because of rising water demand from data centers, agriculture and critical minerals mining.
The region’s access to water would be undermined “if serious planning, policy and regulatory actions are not taken,” said the alliance, a nonprofit that works to protect Great Lakes water resources.
Like other Great Lakes states, Michigan monitors and regulates a large quantity groundwater use. The state requires permits for private wells that pump more than 2 million gallons per day. Public water supplies also have to get permits to expand their capacity. Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy officials said there have been no recent requests from private developers or municipal systems to drill a well or expand their capacity because of a data center.
The data center industry is a significant water user. In 2024, U.S. data centers used 560 billion liters of water, approximately as much as 833,000 American households, according to research by Northern Arizona University’s School of Informatics, Computing and Cyber Systems, where researchers are tracking the facilities’ water use throughout their supply chain.
The most obvious way data centers use water is on-site. The computing equipment inside data centers gets hot and needs to be cooled. Water is key to many of the cooling mechanisms, although different designs lead them to consume vastly different amounts of water.
Evaporative cooling, the cheapest and most common cooling method, uses the most water because it requires water to be released into the air as steam.
A large hyperscale data center using evaporative cooling could use as much as 365 million gallons of water per year, or as many as 12,000 people, Schriberg said. Hyperscale data centers can use as much as 5 million gallons of water per day, said Helena Volzer, senior source water policy manager for the Alliance for the Great Lakes.
“Even that you have to take with a grain of salt,” Volzer said. “The frustrating part in my research was that you couldn’t really find information about water use.”
Closed-loop systems that circulate and reuse water are far more efficient, using “a fraction” of the water that evaporative cooling systems use, Schriberg said. Cooling systems that pour water directly on computer equipment use the least water, but the water can become contaminated.
“I wish there were easy solutions to this, but this scale of industrial development and the fact that it has these very large cooling needs, you’re trading off between water usage, energy usage and water quality,” Schriberg said. “Basically, every one of these technologies has trade-offs on all three of those.”
The data center under development in Saline Township by Related Digital, OpenAI and Oracle would be cooled with a closed-loop system, Related Digital spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said.
Ravitz said the data center will use approximately 20,000 gallons of water per day, which she said is “about the same amount for an office building, and far less than what would be used if the entire acreage was farmed.” The developers will build wells for the data center instead of connecting to the municipal system.
Using fossil fuels means using water
The water that data centers use on-site is only a piece of their potential demand. Another important piece is the amount of water that electricity companies use to make the energy that powers data centers.
“You have high-tech industries that potentially require water for cooling, but they also require energy to operate, and that energy may also require water,” said Erika Jensen, executive director of the Great Lakes Commission, a delegation of state and Canadian provincial appointees created by the Great Lakes Basin Compact signed by the Great Lakes states. “There’s kind of a domino effect.”
Electricity and water go hand-in-hand, depending on how that electricity is made, said Susan Fancy, managing director of UM’s Global CO₂ Initiative, which researches carbon capture and utilization technology. Unlike renewable wind and solar systems, which use almost no water, nuclear and coal power plants “have significant evaporative losses of water,” Fancy said. Natural gas plants also use water, but less than coal and nuclear plants.
Water used to make electricity in Michigan has decreased considerably over the last decade, but the trend might not last, Fancy said. In May, Fancy gave a presentation assessing the history and future of the Great Lakes electricity sector’s water needs to the Great Lakes Compact Council, a partnership of governors from the Great Lakes states.
Fancy and her team of UM researchers found that the region significantly decarbonized or used less coal and nuclear power from 2014-23, as well as used 24% less water and increased its gross domestic product or economic output. The decline was caused by the states and provinces adopting more wind and solar systems and closing coal plants, Fancy said.
But it might not last. President Donald Trump’s administration is prioritizing coal, including keeping open a west Michigan coal-fired plant that was scheduled to close, while some lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have embraced nuclear energy. The resurgence in coal and nuclear, the abandonment of federal climate goals and the rise of power-hungry data centers stand to reverse the declines in water use.
“Our consumptive use of water for power generation has declined since 2015. We’ve made improvements. That’s because of the retirement of coal-fired power plants,” said Volzer with the Alliance for the Great Lakes. “However, the federal administration is now keeping those coal plants online longer … and bringing new generation online as well.”
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an emergency order in May requiring Consumers Energy to continue operating its coal-fired J.H. Campbell power plant in Ottawa County, citing an “energy emergency” that is disputed by environmental groups who are challenging the continued orders. Consumers had planned to close the Campbell plant that month.
At the same time, Palisades Nuclear Power Plant owner Holtec International is pursuing a plan to resume power production at the Covert Township nuclear plant, which went offline in 2022. It would be the first time an American nuclear plant goes from decommissioning status to power production. The plan has had the support of Trump, former President Joe Biden, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and a bipartisan group of state lawmakers.
“Now, instead of closing coal plants, we’re trying to keep them open, and we’re reopening nuclear plants,” Fancy said. “To some extent, the driver of that is data centers. I wonder how much progress in terms of reducing evaporative water loss we are going to reverse.”
In their May presentation, the UM researchers concluded the region had the water and electricity capacity to support approximately 181 mid-sized data centers. That number is already outdated, Fancy said.
“We don’t know how much we will need in the future, right now today, based on hard facts,” she said.
Reusing water eyed as solution
That’s why the Great Lakes Commission wanted to understand more about the relationship between energy production and water use, Jensen said. The commission staff recognizes the potential benefits of having those tech facilities in the region, but wants to make sure they are careful with Great Lakes water, she said.
“I think in a region where we are blessed with a lot of fresh water, it’s important we take steps to make sure that continues to be the case in the future, and promote opportunities to be efficient with the water resources we are blessed with here in the Great Lakes region,” Jensen said.
In October, the Great Lakes Commission passed a pair of resolutions encouraging state and industry leaders to study the relationship between energy use and water use and develop strategies for reusing non-potable water.
The “accelerated development” of data centers, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the Great Lakes region will require “substantial” electricity and water, the commission said, but expanding the region’s water supply through reuse “can increase economic growth by simultaneously securing ample volumes for high-tech operations and industrial developments and preserving available potable water resources.”
