A single data center drinks five million gallons of water a day

A single data center drinks five million gallons of water a day.

Eighty percent evaporates and does not come back.

The United States built an economy that runs on electricity and water. It does not have enough of either. The data center buildout didn’t cause this. It just made it impossible to keep pretending.

The grid was built for 1990.

Fifty-six percent of data center electricity comes from fossil fuels. Fossil plants need water to make steam to spin turbines to make the electricity to cool the servers that need the water. It is a loop, and the loop is thirsty.

China invested $625 billion in clean energy in 2024. Their solar farms generate more electricity monthly than America’s entire nuclear fleet. They doubled wind and solar capacity in three years.

The US has 94 nuclear reactors and zero under construction. China has 58 operating, 27 under construction, and just approved 10 more. They build them at one-third the cost.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Desalination is an energy problem. Cheap surplus electricity plus coastline equals freshwater. China overbuilt energy on purpose. In Shandong, they opened a plant producing freshwater cheaper than tap water using waste heat from power plants — making green hydrogen as a byproduct. They’re building Asia’s first nuclear-powered desalination plant.

America has 12,000 miles of coastline and a grid that can’t support what already exists.

Then there’s the people who actually build things.

74% of young Americans say trade school carries a stigma.

79% say their parents pushed college. 5% say their parents encouraged trades. Deloitte projects 2.1 million skilled jobs vacant by 2030. 30% of union electricians are near retirement.

China runs 11,000 vocational schools with 35 million students. They train 10 million skilled workers a year. This year they announced plans to train 30 million more by 2027 — in aerospace, nuclear engineering, advanced manufacturing, and AI.

Lucky for us, China has its own version of this problem.

Their vocational enrollment dropped as a percentage, too. But China saw the trend and counterattacked with state-level mobilization.

America saw the same trend and lacked a response or recognition of the scale of the problem.

Many AI conversations focus on chips and models.

They should include the electricity powering the chips, the water cooling the servers, and the electrician wiring the building.

China talks about all of it. Then they build.