The Stratos Project is the crystallization point for a pattern the data reveals: most of America's new AI infrastructure is being built in the exact places that can least afford the water.
A gravel road cuts through the high desert of Box Elder County, Utah, ending at a site where one company has permission to pull 5 million gallons of water every day in a county that has been in severe drought since the summer of 2025. The facility doesn't exist yet. The permit does.
That facility is the Stratos Project, a 40,000-acre datacenter campus approved by Utah in May 2026 over objections from the Sierra Club and local water advocates. Its power demand: 9 gigawatts. That is more electricity than Utah consumes today, all of it. It is, as one critic put it, the size of Manhattan, approved in one of the driest states in the country during one of the worst drought seasons in the region's modern record.
Stratos is not an outlier. It is a crystallization point.
An analysis by The Guardian, drawing on data from Cleanview, a datacenter location tracker, and the USDA's drought monitor, found that 517 of the 809 planned US datacenters sited since early 2025 are in counties that experienced drought conditions throughout the past year. The same proportion holds for existing facilities. The data shows a pattern: the industry is concentrating its infrastructure in the places that are running out of water, not despite that fact but, in part, because of it. Dry air reduces the corrosion rate on servers. Sparse populations mean cheaper land and fewer neighbors to object. State governments in the Intermountain West have competed to offer tax incentives.
More than 60 percent of the contiguous United States was in some stage of drought as of June 2026, the largest springtime drought footprint in modern records, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center.
Into this landscape, the datacenter industry is pouring water at a scale that is difficult to comprehend without a reference point. Large facilities can require up to 5 million gallons per day, a volume equivalent to what roughly 50,000 people use, according to MOST Policy Initiative, a nonpartisan research organization that tracks datacenter water use. US datacenters directly consumed 17.4 billion gallons in 2023. By 2028, projections range from 38 billion to 73 billion gallons per year, the initiative noted, citing Shehabi et al. 2024 and EPA projections.
The irony is structural, not philosophical. AI systems are being trained on hardware that consumes electricity generated in part by burning fossil fuels. That burning emits greenhouse gases, which worsen the drought conditions that make water sourcing for these facilities more contentious. The cycle is self-reinforcing, and it has a specific address in Box Elder County, Utah.
Texas is the largest single site for this expansion. More than 400 datacenters are operating or under construction in the state, which has offered billions in tax incentives to attract the industry. By 2040, datacenters could account for 3 to 9 percent of Texas water use, up from less than 1 percent today, according to a COMPASS white paper from UT Austin published in May 2026. That range, depending on which scenario plays out, represents a category shift in the state's water planning.
The water-intensity of AI is not uniform. It depends on cooling technology, the energy source, and whether a facility uses recycled water or draws from municipal supplies or aquifers. The widely cited figure of roughly 500 milliliters per 100-word AI prompt comes from a 2023 arXiv preprint that has not been independently replicated in operational settings, and most researchers caution against treating it as a direct facility-level accounting. Real-world facility water use varies considerably.
In Utah, the Stratos approval drew immediate criticism from Franque Bains, the Sierra Club's Utah director, who called it irresponsible. Christopher Dalbom, a water resources law professor at Tulane, has raised questions about whether aquifers allocated for the project will actually be able to deliver. Ranchbot, a company that sells remote water monitoring systems to ranchers, has seen a spike in inquiries from landowners near proposed datacenter sites, according to CEO Andrew Coppin. The concern in several western states is the same: water rights allocated to a datacenter are water that is not allocated to agriculture, municipalities, or instream flows.
The developer rationale is coherent. Arid climates offer operational advantages: lower ambient humidity means slower equipment corrosion, and the sparse populations of counties like Box Elder mean land is cheap and political opposition is diffuse. Tax incentives in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico have been structured explicitly to compete for this industry. The economics are rational. The water math is what the next few years will test.
The permits are issued. The gravel road is graded. The aquifer is not guaranteed to refill.