Ok, can we actually cool data centers with our pee?
TechCrunch Amanda Silberling
Liquid Death joked about using pee to cool AI data centers. The joke lands because recycled wastewater already does a lot of that work.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Amanda Silberling — read the original for the full story.
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Liquid Death and former Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce have turned water-cooling into a gross-out gag: their ad pitch is that people should pee on computers to help save humanity. It’s meant as a joke. But it also points at something real — data centers already lean on recycled water, and in some places that recycled supply is doing serious work.
Michael Obradovitch of Ecolab told TechCrunch that alternative water sources are already being used to cool these facilities. Bruno Pigott of the WateReuse Association made the basic point even plainer: wastewater and sewage can be treated and reused, and that treated water often contains urine before it’s cleaned up. The pitch is not “pour pee into a cooling tower.” The pitch is that urine is part of what gets filtered out of a much larger stream of waste.
That filtration matters because the raw stuff would be a mess. Pigott said urine brings salts, urea, bacteria and other organic matter that would leave mineral deposits and force constant cleaning if it were used directly. He also pointed to evaporative cooling, where hot air passes through water to pull heat away, as the kind of system that would hate a steady stream of unprocessed urine. Humans can turn urine into drinking water — astronauts already do this in space — but that’s not a practical answer for the huge volumes data centers need.
The infrastructure problem is the real bottleneck. Greta Zornes of CDM Smith said recycled water has been used to cool many industries for decades, and that data centers are now driving a boom in demand. But she also said facilities need to be near wastewater plants that are large enough to supply them, which is a problem when data centers spread into rural areas where the treatment plants are too small.
Loudoun County, Virginia, shows both sides of the story. It has more than 250 data centers and plans for at least two dozen more. As of 2025, those data centers used about 200 million gallons of recycled water a day, yet that still covered only 43% of daily water use there; the other 260 million gallons came from potable supplies. Meta is also set to invest at least $270 million in wastewater infrastructure near its data centers, and Pigott is pushing a 30% tax credit to help other industries do the same.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The pee joke is dumb, which is why it works. The more serious lesson is that AI’s water problem is no longer hiding in the plumbing; it’s front-page material, and that should make every data center plan look a lot less futuristic and a lot more municipal. If a sector needs cities to build treatment plants around it, maybe it’s time to stop pretending this is just software with nicer lighting.
Read more about this at: TechCrunch
