In a cheeky marketing campaign, Liquid Death teamed up with former Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce to propose a solution to the environmental impact of AI data centers, which require massive quantities of water to prevent servers from overheating. “AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water,” Kelce quips in the video. “That’s why Liquid Death and Garage Beer have teamed up. We want your pee to cool these data centers.” The ad, featuring people singing “Let’s pee on computers together to save humanity!” is clearly a joke — but it accidentally highlights a real, growing practice in the tech industry.
The Real Science Behind the Joke
While the commercial is tongue-in-cheek, the underlying concept is grounded in reality. “The Liquid Death commercial is funny and tongue-in-cheek,” Michael Obradovitch, vice president of Data Center Global Accounts at Ecolab, told TechCrunch. “But in reality, there is a fair amount of alternative water sources already being used to a similar extent to cool these data centers.”
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These alternative sources include recycled water, which is produced by treating wastewater and sewage to make it safe for industrial use. “You wouldn’t just use pee, but you can clean it and make it into useful water, and that’s what we advocate,” Bruno Pigott, executive director of the WateReuse Association and former acting assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), told TechCrunch.
Directly pouring urine into a cooling tower would be a disaster. “Pee contains all sorts of stuff. It contains salts, it contains urea, bacteria, organic matter of all sorts that can leave mineral deposits. If you just put that into a cooling tower or something else, it would require constant cleaning,” said Pigott. “One of the methods of cooling is called evaporative cooling, where hot air is passed through water to remove heat through evaporation. Can you imagine if you just poured urine through hot air?”
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Recycled Water Is Already Cooling Data Centers
Water treatment facilities use membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, and ultraviolet light to clean wastewater to a standard suitable for industrial use. In some cases, the water can even be treated to potable quality. “We use recycled water for cooling for all kinds of industries, and we have for decades,” Dr. Greta Zornes, practice leader for water reuse at engineering firm CDM Smith, told TechCrunch. “So this is only one application, but definitely, there’s been a boom in recycled water for data center cooling.”
The scale of this practice is significant in some regions. Loudoun County, Virginia, home to more than 250 data centers, used about 200 million gallons of recycled water per day in 2025 — but that still only accounted for 43% of daily data center water usage in the area. The remaining 260 million gallons came from potable water supplies, according to Loudoun Water.
Infrastructure Challenges and Industry Investment
The biggest obstacle to wider adoption is infrastructure. “You have to be somewhat near a waste water treatment facility that’s sizable enough that you have enough water to use,” Zornes said. “So when data centers go out into rural areas, a lot of times the wastewater treatment plants just aren’t big enough.”
Building that infrastructure takes time and capital. Obradovitch believes the AI industry could help drive investment. Meta, for example, has committed at least $270 million to wastewater infrastructure projects near its data centers. “That’s where data centers can actually come in and be anchors of water infrastructure,” he said.
On the policy side, Pigott is advocating for a 30% tax credit to help scale recycled water infrastructure. “We think it would greatly accelerate the pace with which data centers and other industries entered into this area,” he said.
While Liquid Death’s campaign was intended as humor, it has sparked a conversation about a serious issue. A recent Gallup poll found that about seven out of ten Americans oppose data centers in their communities, reflecting growing concern about their environmental footprint. “I’m glad that people are concerned about water, and anything that raises awareness of water, however crude it may be, could actually be beneficial,” Pigott said. “It gives us a chance to educate the public about what we’re doing today.”
Disclaimer: This article discusses water reuse practices in data centers and does not constitute financial, investment, or environmental advice. The market for data center infrastructure and related technologies is volatile and subject to change.
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