Save Water for the Tech! Wait...What?!

    When it comes to our data, I'm not sure about you, but my first thought always was held that it's just this information kept in thin air that we call wifi, and the cloud and somehow just lingers and transfers everywhere.  Although, when we stop and actually think about the reality of it, we ourselves can quickly debunk our original thought and understand there must be more to it.  Very much there is! 

    All that we save to our storage in our gmails, our icloud accounts, our outlook or wherever you may keep your back up data for your phones, computers, or tablets.  All of this data goes back to, and is stored in massive buildings that take hundreds of acres just filled with fiber optic cables and giant computer boxes.  All of this just for those screenshots to prove your point in an argument, for those files you never deleted, those e-mails racking up in your spam folder.  One might think, alright so what's the big deal, how many of these data centers could we possibly need, and how much harm could they possibly pose? Welp! A lot! 

    Many areas including my own are protesting and suffocating to the costs of water and electricity rising in our bills to afford these data centers being close to home.  With AI becoming a large part of life and something that is being incorporated into just about literally everything, when I say everything, I mean everything, the affects are growing more and more noticeable. 

    Banks use AI to process your checks now, Google uses AI for your searches, Facebook and Meta uses AI for your posts and algorithms, AI is used in marketing, I have even seen on LinkedIn that younger generations are making AI personalities of themselves to send into office meetings or job interviews instead of attending themselves!!! Then of course we all know about Copilot, and Gemini.  We constantly add this technology into our lives trickling in little more and a little more.  Now it has become that time that we have all been warned about for decades.  The day it becomes human vs technology.  Sounds dramatic I know, but I'm not trying to fear monger, it really is a reality for us today.  Today humanity is learning lessons that we don't have history to look back at to refer to.  We have no past to learn from. Just theories.  So, what do we know so far on what our endangerment is? 

    Data centers use to be mainly just one giant large building a part of a headquarters where all the tech geeks worked and kept things running.  Today, data centers have now become whole entire campuses of data centers, there is that much to be stored on the internet. In 2007 when the internet was still semi-new and YouTube and Google were just starting to take their rise in society; the average data center consumed about 10,000-20,000 square feet.  Today in 2026 the average data center consumes about 224 acres of land.  That's a massive increase in space taken up. Some single projects consume about 40,000 acres of land. The negative to this is that these take away land from the animals to live in decreasing populations of native animals drastically.  Also, commonly these data centers are farmlands bought up from struggling farmers offered a big check for their farm if they sold the land to a billionaire with data centers to build.  In turn this ripple effects into our cost of food as rarity of farms increase.  

    These data centers have also created what they now call heat islands.  These are areas that surround these data centers that tend to increase the surrounding area temperature on average about 5-12 degrees Fahrenheit, just enough to affect migration of birds and the sense of animals. Probably also putting its ripples into climate change as well.

    Next, the electric bill.  It's technology, so of course it needs electricity.  While we are all in a panic around the world about the oil resources depleting by the day and needing to transfer oil ran resources over to electricity, we are also competing against these data centers to provide enough for sustainable human life in a civil society. In 2007 the average data center consumed about 61 billion Kilowatts annually.  Now in 2026 the average data center consumes about 250 billion Kilowatts per year, which breaks down to about 2,400 average American homes annual electric use, per hour for a data center.  Much more electricity being deprived away from the people, while there's people living in rolling brown outs and black outs due to lack of electrical resource to go around. 

        Now, for the water bill. In 2007 the amount of water data centers used was barely even tracked.  It wasn't a worry and didn't make a dent in the resources.  Today water has become such a scarcity with data centers, that in some areas farmers and homeowners are consistently in court battles with data centers over who has more of a right to use the water given to the area.  Farmers and homeowners who wind up with a datacenter nearby commonly wind up having faucets running at a trickle after the data center moves in.  Could you imagine giving up showers and washing dishes to create room for people to have a data center to save their screenshots and talk to an AI? I'd be pretty ticked. Even in lesser severe situations, it commonly creates a rarity in the water that causes a rise in cost on the water bill.

    This one I don't know if you're ready for. Oil and gas today are a hot topic leaving citizens of countries around the world hot under the collar to even think about.  As though the world events with the chaos between leaders isn't irritating enough to our pockets at the pump, wait until you find out how much data centers pull away from us. In 2007 data centers and oil didn't even make a connection.  Today AI data centers have become some of the largest population of oil company owners in the world, becoming our main diesel generators. Why? Because, ;about 81% of AI centers are ran on diesel powered generators to provide them their electricity. These generators consume around 80-90 gallons of diesel an hour.  So, while we struggle to afford our gas, we can also know that much of the gas resources are going towards our data before it comes to us. 

So, what do we do?

    You might feel hopeless and like there's nothing that can be done about this.  Although, there is, and I can't stand alone on this.  We, collectively, each individual put in towards the demand of this.  The concept of consumer choice used to be taught in school as a part of home ech.  We were taught about consumerism, demand, and boycotts.  Today often I see people just lost and overwhelmed feeling alone and like they don't make a difference.  This is a mentality fed to you by those who don't want you to know your power.  Just one single person uses over 3,500 GB of data just by having the Facebook app downloaded on your phone.  By simply switching that app to a Facebook light saves over 3,000 of those GB, just by going to a non-updated version that doesn't have the built in AI.  I have done it.  My phone actually runs more smoothly, and I gained a whole 8 GB of memory back into my storage by simply switching from Facebook to Facebook Lite.  If I could encourage more of you to do this, we could all collectively reduce the need for these data centers and maybe in the long run effect, if enough of us do this, bring our cost of electric, gas, and water back down to what they were before AI came around.  

    The average data centers holds about 10-50 Petabytes of data.  That's 10,000,000 GB.  So if I can get at least 3,334 people to be willing to undownload Facebook, and even just switch to the Lite version, we could remove the need for one whole data center.  That's only one quarter of my small rural town.  Now imagine how much it could impact our states, country, and world in resources and cost if we all became just slightly more conscientious of our data usage. 

Okay, So I got you on board, what do you do now? 

Here is a list of things that you yourself can add to your daily habits that would significantly reduce by hundreds to thousands of GB of data of usage from you.  

- Choose Lite versions of apps when possible

-When choosing apps, compare the data storage amount of them, every app you download adds data to be stored. 

- Delete old e-mails, and your spam e-mails.  If you don't want to look at the spam e-mails, commonly you can choose to select all and delete the whole mailbox to clear it. 

- Delete conversations with AI when you are done.  AI Gemini has even recommended this to me. Every conversation that you have with Copilot or Gemini that you don't delete afterwards, has to be stored in an AI data center.  The more you delete after your use, the less that has to be stored.  Also, again referred by AI Gemini, when talking with AI, try to be as clear, direct, and all information out up front in the first typed in question or request to AI.  This is so that it can reduce the number of times it streams for information to create a response.  Every time you trigger a response from AI, it sends data back to an AI data center to be stored.  

- Be mindful of your streaming.  Anytime that you have an opportunity to stream in a lower quality, take it.  Also download before streaming when possible. We really don't need for our tv to be so vibrant we see with lizard sight, viewing new colors unknown to human before.  We got by long enough looking at trees and birds then, black and white films, then our pixelated fuzzy cartoons. If you want real feal, go outside and live your life how you want to experience it.  Stop trying to live vicariously with technology. It's honestly anxiety inducing to the subconcious to do so too.  So, it'd be a win win to experience reality. 

-Do tech cleanouts!  Occasionally, go through your phone and just look through old photos and screenshots or downloads. You'll likely find hundreds of photos you would love to delete and create some space getting rid of.  Also, check your files on your phone, everything you even pdf viewed will be stored on your phone and could be deleted and save you whole GB of storage.  There are people out there that are paying google subscriptions every month to hold onto all these files and photos and other storage when if they did a clean out, they could probably save themselves a few bucks a month.  It could be friendly to your budget too!!!

-If you are subscribed to something and you don't care for it unsubscribe and save yourself the deleting of e-mails, it also helps to save data stored in data centers now tracking your e-mail to send newsletters to. 

- Download music to your phone to listen to.  Save your favorite songs and go back to the 2010s when we had our iPod and mp3 players.  There are tons of free music downloads and music player apps for phones.  It helps to save data by not streaming music, plus unlimited skips for free and you are the DJ! It's an all-around win! Yes, it takes storage in your phone, but commonly not as much as one would think.  I have almost 200 songs equaling about a little over10 hours of playing time and its barely leaves a dent in my storage. 

    So what changes are you inspired to make now?  What habits will you form to join the movement to reduce techs demand of our resources? I hope that this has been enough to at least inspired you to do further research and look a little further into it and maybe if we can get enough of us together, we can reduce the demand for data centers, and bring our farms and prices of water, electricity, and oil back to what it was a little less than a decade ago. 

Cheers!