A deliberately provocative campaign from beverage brands Liquid Death and Garage Beer, fronted by former football player Jason Kelce, suggests donating urine to help cool AI data centres. The premise is designed to attract attention, but the engineering reality is less direct: untreated urine cannot simply be poured into a cooling system.
The campaign nevertheless points toward a genuine infrastructure question. Data centres require large volumes of water for some cooling designs, and operators are increasingly looking beyond drinking-water supplies. Properly treated municipal wastewater can serve that purpose, provided facilities, pipelines and treatment capacity are available nearby.
Raw urine is not usable cooling water
Urine contains salts, urea, bacteria and other organic material. TechCrunch reports that sending it untreated through data-centre equipment would create deposits, require frequent cleaning and produce an obvious smell. Those contaminants make the campaign’s literal proposal impractical.
Wastewater treatment changes the equation. Municipal sewage, which includes urine along with many other waste streams, can be processed through technologies such as membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet treatment. The result can meet the requirements for industrial uses that do not need potable water.
Recycled water has been used in industry for decades. Its application to data-centre cooling is therefore not an experimental consequence of the AI boom, even if growing computing demand has made the option more visible. The source does not claim that every facility can switch easily or that recycled supply eliminates the environmental effects of cooling.
Location is a central limitation. A data centre needs access to a treatment plant with sufficient output and to the infrastructure that carries reclaimed water. Smaller rural treatment plants may not produce enough for a large campus, while building new pipelines and upgrading plants can require substantial investment.
Virginia shows both progress and dependence
Loudoun County, Virginia, provides a useful measure of the opportunity and the remaining dependence on potable supplies. The county has more than 250 data centres, with another 24 planned, according to TechCrunch. Loudoun Water says those facilities used about 200 million gallons per day of recycled water in 2025, representing roughly 43% of their water consumption.
The same facilities still used about 260 million gallons per day of potable water, or 57%. Those figures show that reclaimed water can supply a large share of demand at scale, but they also show how far the region remains from removing drinking water from data-centre cooling altogether.
Operators can help finance the necessary infrastructure. Meta has committed at least $270 million to wastewater projects near its data centres, the report says. That spending may expand treatment capacity that also benefits communities, although the source does not quantify how much of the investment directly offsets Meta’s own consumption.
One advocate cited by TechCrunch proposes a 30% tax credit for recycled-water infrastructure. That is a policy recommendation, not an adopted national standard. Subsidies could accelerate projects, but they would also shift part of the cost from operators to taxpayers and would need rules that demonstrate real water savings.
Public acceptance depends on measurable results
Water is only one source of resistance to data-centre development, but it has become a visible one. A Gallup finding cited in the article says roughly seven in ten Americans oppose data centres in their communities. The report does not attribute all of that opposition to water use, so the number should not be read as a referendum on cooling alone.
Recycled wastewater offers a practical response where geography and infrastructure permit it. It can reduce demand for treated drinking water and give communities a productive use for an existing waste stream. It still consumes energy for treatment and distribution, and it does not resolve concerns about electricity, land or local development.
The beer campaign turns an established industrial practice into a joke that is easy to share. Its useful contribution is not the collection of individual donations. It is the reminder that the water leaving homes can be cleaned and reused before scarce potable supplies are committed to cooling computation.
