Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC this week that data centers “don’t use water,” dismissing widespread concern about the industry’s water footprint as “propaganda by our adversaries to try to slow us down.” On Squawk Box, Lutnick argued the real water hog in America is cattle, saying, “One of my favorite things is when people talk about data centers using water. The No. 1 product in America that uses water is cattle.”
The claim runs directly counter to the data. A 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report estimated U.S. data centers used roughly 66 billion liters of water in 2023, largely for cooling systems that keep servers from overheating, and projected hyperscale operators could use somewhere between 60 and 124 billion liters annually by 2028 as AI computing demand grows.
Lutnick Made the Opposite Argument Last Year
Lutnick’s own past comments undercut the new claim. In a May 2025 interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, promoting data center construction as a jobs engine, Lutnick said of AI data centers: “These AI things, they suck water and they need water and so they need a plumber… they need, like, an HVAC specialist that starts at $100,000.” At the time, the water use was the selling point, evidence that data centers would require enough infrastructure and staffing to support high-paying trade jobs.
Roughly sixteen months later, the same fact became something Lutnick said doesn’t exist. The contradiction was flagged by several outlets after journalist Acyn Torabi posted both clips side by side, and it has circulated widely since.
Communities near planned or existing data centers, including in Virginia, Georgia and Arizona, have raised water-supply and utility-rate concerns for years as hyperscale campuses have multiplied to meet AI demand. Utilities in several states have had to weigh data center water and power draw against the needs of residential customers and agriculture. None of that appears to square with Lutnick’s framing of the issue as manufactured criticism from foreign adversaries.
Whether data centers use meaningful amounts of water is not a matter of dispute among researchers who study the topic, it is a documented and growing cost of the AI buildout. Lutnick’s own words from last year make that plain, even if his framing this week suggests otherwise.
Read more from The Hill, Common Dreams and Yahoo News.
