Water is a shared and vital resource, and we approach water stewardship with the responsibility and technical expertise it deserves. Being good stewards of water is critical for our business, and it also benefits the communities where our data centers are located by enhancing water quality, boosting water supply and reliability, and promoting biodiversity.
Our water stewardship efforts are rooted in three pillars which propel us toward our goal of becoming water positive in 2030, meaning we will restore more water than we consume in the watersheds in which we operate.
- Maximizing efficiency and minimizing water use: We minimize water use in our data centers by design and use water as efficiently as possible in our operations.
- Supporting water restoration projects: By supporting water restoration projects in the watersheds where we operate, we will restore 200% of water consumed in high water-stress regions and 100% in medium water-stress regions.
- Being transparent with our water data: We publish and share detailed information in our annual sustainability report about our water withdrawals, restoration projects, and progress on our path to becoming water positive.
Maximizing Efficiency and Minimizing Water Use
Our industry-leading data centers are the backbone of our apps, technologies, and AI ambitions, providing the infrastructure that drives innovation. Advanced cooling systems are required to ensure that our data center hardware functions at the right temperature, and we sometimes need to use water to prevent equipment from overheating and operate within safety thresholds.
We determine the most efficient cooling technology for each data center by assessing a variety of local factors — location, climate, available resources, and technological needs — while also working in partnership with the local water utility. Depending on local conditions, our typical data center design utilizes a direct-to-chip liquid, closed-loop cooling system with dry coolers. In these systems, a coolant is circulated through our data halls in a closed piped system to absorb the heat generated by our servers and hardware. The heat is then removed by operating dry coolers that blow air over the pipes, carrying away excess heat. For these data centers, there is no operational water use in the cooling system and water use at the site is minimal and limited to domestic and janitorial needs, equipment cleaning, and fire protection.
Our Beaver Dam, Wisconsin data center will feature this closed-loop, liquid-cooled system with dry coolers, and the total estimated annual water use for the data center, once operational, is anticipated to be less than that of two full-service restaurants in a year.
As part of our broader water conservation efforts at our data centers, we install water-saving fixtures and appliances within the data center buildings and plant native or adaptive plant species to limit the need for irrigation water. We also focus on conserving potable water during data center construction. For example, during the construction of our Kansas City, Missouri data center, we saved more than one million gallons of potable water by capturing and repurposing stormwater from onsite retention ponds to suppress dust during the site’s construction.
All of our operational data center buildings achieve LEED Gold certification, which means they meet very high standards for energy efficiency, clean and renewable energy, water conservation, supply chain responsibility, and recycling. We also use AI to optimize data center cooling, reducing both energy and water use.
Supporting Water Restoration Projects
Reducing the amount of water consumed at our data centers and using it more efficiently is key to reaching our water positive goal. Additionally, we are investing in water conservation and restoration projects that promote biodiversity in local natural habitats, boost water quality and reliability, and ensure safe drinking water for local communities. The water restoration projects we support have a hydrological connection to the source water consumed in our operations and are verified by independent third parties. See our annual Volumetric Water Benefits Report for a comprehensive overview of the projects we support.
Since 2017, we have funded or supported more than 40 water restoration projects in nine watersheds where we operate data centers. In 2024 alone, these operational restoration projects returned more than 1.59 billion gallons of water to high and medium water-stress regions. Once all projects are fully implemented, they are expected to restore 2.9 to 3.4 billion gallons of water annually.
- Scarce water is fueling the need to improve water efficiency on the Colorado River Indian Reservation in Arizona, where agriculture is critical to the economy of the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT). Meta is partnering with N-Drip technology to support CRIT in replacing flood irrigation with drip irrigation, which reduces water usage, evaporation, and runoff by providing water directly to the soil slowly. This project will restore an estimated 64.9 million gallons of water per year, and a pilot project using this technology resulted in 30-52% water savings.
- In Texas, we partnered with Texan by Nature, the Texas Longleaf Team, and other companies to restore 2,000 acres of longleaf pine forest in the Trinity River Watershed. A healthy longleaf pine ecosystem filters and stores fresh water, supports biodiversity, and serves as a critical habitat for more than 30 endangered and threatened species. This project will restore an estimated 44 million gallons of water each year.
- We’re also working with Audubon New Mexico, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, and the Bureau of Reclamation to support flow restoration projects that deliver fresh water to ecologically important river locations. Our efforts played a part in keeping the entire 35-mile Isleta Reach flowing, which is crucial to sustaining wetland vegetation and the quality of fish and wildlife habitat during the dry summer months. The project will restore an estimated 81.5 million gallons of water per year.
Funding Local Water Infrastructure Improvements
We’re committed to playing a positive role and investing in the long-term vitality of the communities in which we operate. This includes supporting local water infrastructure projects. For example, at our Kuna, Idaho data center, we invested over $70 million to build a water and wastewater treatment facility that has since been gifted to the city. This new facility will serve the people and businesses of Kuna for generations to come. For our Richland Parish, Louisiana data center, we are investing over $200 million in local infrastructure, including new wastewater infrastructure, that will be given back to the local community and improve local water quality. And in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, we’re working with local conservation partners to restore 570 acres of wetlands and prairie on and surrounding our data center campus.
Being Transparent With Our Water Data
We will continue to share progress toward our 2030 water positive goal and disclose how much water and energy we consume at our operational data centers in our annual sustainability report and environmental data index. In addition, we’ll continue to share aspects of our data center cooling advancements through the Open Compute Project, which focuses on redesigning hardware to support the growing demands of our data center infrastructure at scale.
We continue to lead our industry in pushing the boundaries of data center cooling technologies and other innovations, minimizing our water use throughout the infrastructure that brings our apps and technologies to life. We also pledge to sustain our investments in water conservation and restoration projects through our long-term partnerships with NGOs that are critical to solving shared water challenges.
