No, you shouldn't pee to cool data centers — but recycled water already does

In the campaign, Kelce says “AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water” before urging viewers to help “pee on computers together to save humanity.” The joke is close to a real practice, water experts told TechCrunch. “The Liquid Death commercial is funny and tongue-in-cheek,” said Michael Obradovitch, vice president of Data Center Global Accounts at Ecolab, “but in reality, there is a fair amount of alternative water sources already being used to a similar extent to cool these data centers.”

That alternative is recycled water — wastewater and sewage, treated with membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, and UV light until clean enough for industrial cooling. “You wouldn’t just use pee, but you can clean it and make it into useful water, and that’s what we advocate,” said Bruno Pigott, executive director of the WateReuse Association. Dr. Greta Zornes, a water-reuse practice leader at CDM Smith, said she now works on recycled water for data centers “every day,” calling it “a boom” within a field she’s spent decades in.

The catch is infrastructure. Data centers need to sit near a wastewater treatment plant sized to supply them, which rural sites often lack. Loudoun County, Virginia — home to more than 250 data centers, with at least two dozen more planned — drew about 200 million gallons of recycled water a day as of 2025, but that covered only 43% of the county’s daily data-center water use; the remaining 57%, about 260 million gallons, still came from potable supplies, according to Loudoun Water. Meta has committed at least $270 million to wastewater infrastructure near its data centers, and Obradovitch argues data centers could become “anchors of water infrastructure” more broadly. Pigott is separately pushing for a proposed 30% tax credit to speed industry adoption of recycled-water systems.

The underlying tension is real: about seven in 10 Americans oppose data centers in their communities, per a recent Gallup poll, part of a broader backlash to AI’s physical footprint. “I’m glad that people are concerned about water,” Pigott said, “however crude” the reminder.

Why it matters

A joke ad landing near an actual industrial practice shows how mainstream the water cost of AI infrastructure has become — and how much unbuilt treatment capacity still stands between data centers and their host communities’ water supply.