It’s not just the agricultural sector that is facing drought issues.

Relying on data from Virginia Tech, CNBC reports that “the average data center could use 300,000 gallons of water to cool itself — the same water consumption as 100,000 homes.”

Data centers have relied on water as a cheap way to cool the heat produced by massive servers, but ongoing drought is making the tech industry rethink the common cooling method.

According to CNBC, Microsoft and Meta (Facebook) are among the tech industries looking at innovations to conserve water.  Some, such as Cyrus One in Phoenix, are using more expensive cooling methods.

There are about 1,800 data co-location centers in the United States.