A United Nations University report published June 3rd landed with the quiet devastation of a particularly well-sourced fire alarm in a building where everyone has already decided to ignore the fire alarm. The findings: by 2030, the global data centers powering artificial intelligence are projected to consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity annually — nearly triple the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria combined. Those three countries have 650 million people in them. The data centers have servers.
The water numbers are equally cheerful. AI-related water consumption by 2030 could equal the basic annual domestic water needs of every person in Sub-Saharan Africa — 1.3 billion people. This water is used primarily to cool data centers, which generate enormous heat, which requires cooling, which requires water, which requires more energy to pump, which requires more data centers to run the AI that manages the energy systems. It’s a ouroboros of resource consumption that someone, somewhere, has definitely put in a PowerPoint and called “scalable.”
Nvidia announced a new warm-water cooling system this week that it claims eliminates “pretty much all water usage” inside the data center — a statement that is technically true the same way a restaurant eliminating waste by moving the trash outside is technically true. The power plants that feed the data centers still use 2.7 billion gallons of water per day in the U.S. alone. But sure. Solved. The water consumption challenge for data centers is “largely solved,” according to Nvidia’s chief sustainability officer, a sentence that was said out loud by a human being, on purpose, in June 2026.
Meanwhile, Iran’s top negotiator declared this week that Iran will “permanently manage” the Strait of Hormuz going forward — a statement that is either a negotiating position or a declaration of permanent toll-booth status for 20% of the world’s oil supply, depending on your mood. The Pentagon requested an additional $80 billion in Iran war funding. The war was supposed to end in two weeks.
Headline Thread
WATER AND
POWER?
The rhetorical question nobody in Silicon Valley is asking because the answer is “everyone who lives near a data center.” Wear it to your next utility bill opening. Wear it to a city council meeting about that new hyperscale facility going up next to the reservoir. Wear it as a general life philosophy.
Unsolicited Opinions
The Fake News Desk
LOCAL MAN WHO SAW SOMETHING WEIRD IN THE SKY IN 2019 STILL BRINGING IT UP, WILL NOT ELABORATE, ALSO WILL NOT STOP
Roswell resident Gary Petrocelli, 51, once again raised the subject of “the thing over the water tower” at a neighborhood barbecue this weekend, marking the fourteenth documented instance of Petrocelli bringing up the 2019 incident unprompted since June.
“I’m not saying it was aliens,” Petrocelli told attendees, three minutes into a story nobody had asked him to tell. “I’m saying I know what I saw, and it wasn’t a weather balloon, and I’m not going to be lectured about weather balloons by Steve, who wasn’t even there.”
Steve, who was in fact not there, said he has never once brought up weather balloons and would appreciate it if this stopped being framed as a rivalry. Petrocelli’s wife confirmed the story has grown by roughly one new corroborating detail per telling since 2019 and that the water tower has since been demolished, which she considers “convenient.”
Petrocelli says he holds no grudge against a doubting public and simply wants it on the record that he was right, will continue to be right, and is available to discuss it further at any gathering, regardless of the stated topic.
