Can We Cool Data Centers With… Pee?

0:00A Dark Night, a quiet house, but inside danger was lurking. Oh, not really. We have Xfinity Shield, so we're not worried. What if protecting your home and devices could be drama-free? Xfinity, imagine that. Restrictions apply not available in all areas. Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Save the Bay. Protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay for 65 years. Security and corporate volunteer opportunities available along the shoreline to help drive positive change. More at savesfbay.org. Hi, Tabby Cats. Do you have an internet trend, tech subculture, or online auditing you've been wondering about? Well, now you can ask Closel Tabs to investigate. Go to KQED.org, slash podcast, slash Closel Tabs to submit your question. OK, let's get to the show. We want your P to cool these data centers.

1:01OK, so that's NFL star and podcaster Jason Kelsey in a recent marketing campaign to quote, save humanity. How? Well, they need your P. We want your P. Please give us your P. Let's P on computers together. The video starts with Kelsey in a bathroom peeing into a large, resealable mason jar before breaking out into song and marching into a lush green field. He's joined by a farmer, a skateboarder, a shirtless firefighter, a gamer, all different types of people, holding various receptacles of P. It's an all-American fantasy of unity and solidarity and a shared vision of the future.

2:03And of course, it's a nod. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and have another garage beer or liquid dead sparkling energy. Then send your P to the AIT center of your choice. So Jason Kelsey and his beer brand garage beer team up with liquid death, the very punk rock cans, water, venture funded company. This is my friend Amanda Silverling. She's a senior writer at TechCrunch and host of the Internet Culture podcast. Wow, if true. Jason Kelsey is drinking beer and appears to be peeing and he explains that, hey, data centers are using millions and millions of gallons of water every day. This is a really significant environmental issue. What if we solved it by sending data centers our P? Right. And to go along with this, they also are selling data center P jars. Yes. Which they sold out very quickly. But it was essentially like a glass mason jar where I think something they were also trying

3:05to get at is that maybe the color of a light beer could be similar to the color of P. But I think that that means you probably need to be drinking more water. So there's the liquid death marketing, I guess. Okay, we've talked about data centers pretty extensively on this show. Think about the way your laptop might get really, really hot when you run intense functions, like editing video. Or if you're me, playing the Sims. So when we do things on our computers, we need a lot of power to do those things and data centers generate the power that can support like really power intensive computing things which AI is especially very, very compute intensive. Data centers are nothing new. We've relied on them for years. Any online service from streaming movies on Netflix to scrolling through Instagram

4:08Reels is powered by data centers. But this current explosion in data center construction is directly tied to the AI boom. So when you have these data centers, they are doing a lot of work. They're producing a lot of heat. And that can like, it can be bad like when your laptop overheats or something. So one of the tactics that some data centers use to counter that heat is using water for cooling. And often that water is clean, potable drinking water that is then creating a situation where people drinking water in a particular area are competing with the data centers for that drinking water. Which brings us back to Jason Kelsey's P jars. I think people thought it was really funny. Liquid death does good marketing.

5:10But I think that what stuck out to me is that there actually is some real illustration of like this really is how Americans feel. And it was just getting shared around a lot. I think also because there is such a concentrated sentiment against data center construction right now because people are watching very rapidly how AI is changing the world around them. And sometimes that means building data centers in their communities. And they know that these are very water intensive and loud. And maybe are working to enable technologies that they don't feel are ethical sometimes. So I think this was sort of just like a moment where people felt seen by big beer and big water as opposed to big AI. Liquid deaths viral marketing campaign was obviously silly in the video and in the product listing for the now sold out P jars.

6:11They do say, please don't actually send your P. But this video got Amanda thinking. So I was talking about this in Slack with one of my editors and he was like, I mean, I don't see why it couldn't work. And then I was like, I don't know a lot about the engineering behind data centers. I studied English and college, but it's time to learn. Could it actually work? Because if you think about it, it's like people produce a lot of P. We need a lot of water. If P would work, then sure. So like any intrepid reporter, Amanda investigated this question. Could we really cool data centers with P? And if not, are there any alternatives to cooling these massive data centers without relying on our clean, precious drinking water? In today's deep dive, we're getting into all that.

7:12And as it turns out, cooling data centers is not as simple as peeing on computers. Buckle up. This is Close All Tabs. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friends here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let's get into it. Let's open our first tab. And let me just say, I cannot believe that I am actually typing this question out right now. Okay, new tab. Can you actually cool data centers with P? So there's one pretty big problem with this question. Data centers need a lot of water. And human beings just do not pee enough and are not capable of peeing enough to replace

8:14the sheer amount of clean water that data centers use every day. So in Loudon County, Virginia, which is home to more than 250 data centers, it's basically like the data center capital of the US. In 2025, they said that each day the data centers use 460 million gallons of water. And not all of that has to be clean, potable water. So 43% of what Loudon County is using is actually recycled water. But that still does mean that 260 million gallons of water every day are coming from potable water supplies, which is very staggering. I don't can only produce three to eight cups of urine per day. Even if the entire population of the United States managed to produce the maximum amount of pee possible for the human body, it still would not be enough for what Loudon County alone needs for its data centers.

9:16No matter how much trendy canned water everyone drinks, we'd still be like 90 million gallons short. But for the sake of our deep dive, let's say we could replace data center water with pee. What would happen? To answer this question, Amanda needed to talk to experts, real scientists who study waste water recycling and resource management and infrastructure. And I posted on LinkedIn, like, I want to talk to people about pee. If you know about like waste water and data centers, like, please reach out to her surprise, that post took off. Like a lot of people were sharing it and being like, please talk to her because I want to read this article. So I got a lot of outreach from like very overqualified people, which I love that. I mean, one of the people you said was like way, way overqualified was Bruno Pee got who used to be in charge of like waste water for the EPA under the Biden administration. Yeah.

10:17How did Bruno respond when you approached him with this question? Pretty much everyone I talked to for this article was like, this is the most fun part of my day, like, yay. He was very amused by it. Like, he really was like going to play the game. Like, I think everyone I talked to was very willing to follow the thought experiment of like, okay, actually like sending pee to data centers and collecting human pee. Like, there's not enough of it that it would make a difference. But theoretically, what if we did? So to be clear, data center cooling is a lot more complicated than just pouring water on hot circuit boards. Like in the commercial, Jason Kelsey is more so being like, what if we pee on the data centers? What if we like send them our pee, which like no one is literally dumping water on computers? The vast majority of the world's existing data centers use evaporative cooling.

11:21It generally works like this. With all these servers worrying around, it gets pretty hot inside. So cooling towers equipped with big old fans, whole hot air in, passing it through absorbent pads soaked in water, which absorb the heat. Then it spits out nice chilled air. Modern data centers use this in conjunction with other cooling methods. But the point is, they need a lot of clean water to pull it off. You can very quickly see why just straight up urine is not a good coolant for data centers. If you try this out with any liquid other than water, the water in it, the H2O, will evaporate. But all the other gunk will be left behind, collecting on the equipment. Now imagine doing this with human pee. Here's what Bruno told Amanda. Pea contains all sorts of stuff, which great quote to get in an article. It contains salts, it contains urea, bacteria, organic matter of all sorts that can leave

12:23mineral deposits. If you just put that into a cooling tower or something else, it would require constant cleaning. Can you imagine if you just poured urine through hot air? So to say, urine is a liquid and a lot of what is in urine is water, but also it's not a yucky. If you've ever had the misfortune of using a porter potty on a hot summer day, you know the smell. A typical porter potty can hold 60 to 70 gallons of human waste. There's a lot of contention over data center water use numbers, but typical mid-sized data centers use roughly 300,000 gallons of water every day. So imagine the smell of a boiling porter potty in the middle of July. But now there are at least 5,000 more of them. Residents have already pushed back against data centers in their communities because of the noise pollution, the rising energy bills, and the health concerns.

13:25The smell of 5,000 hot porter potty on top of that? Nobody wants that. Plus, the cleaning alone would be a nightmare. It would be so labor intensive that it's just not worth it. But can't we clean the pee? Filter all the gunk out so it's clean, pure water? Astronauts up in space do this. If you think about the recent Artemis 2 mission, they were up there for multiple weeks. They need to drink a lot of water. Humans need so much water to live. And you can only bring so much with you. So they have mechanisms built into the toilets in spacecrafts that then recycle it and sanitize it so that it can be drink again. And I don't know. Science is kind of amazing sometimes. As of a few years ago, astronauts on the International Space Station have managed to recycle 98% of their sweat and urine into clean drinking water.

14:28That's huge. It's all thanks to this nifty NASA device called a Brian processor. So why can't we use that? It's so expensive. The Brian processor for a single flight ready unit costs over 5 million dollars. The International Space Station has like seven crew members at a time. It just does not scale when you think about deploying this for a whole town, much less the entire country. But not all is lost. Jason Kelsey's very catchy song inspired Amanda to start digging into another alternative method for cooling down data centers. Weast water. That's the used dirty water that is no longer safe for human consumption. Like what you flush down the toilet or the runoff from a car wash. So it's kind of like a silly idea, but then not all of the water that we use is like brand new fresh water. That's not really a thing if you think back to learning about the water cycle in school.

15:31Like what's the difference between the clean, potable water that is in like when you go and buy a water bottle at the store versus like wastewater. Someone who used to be high up in the EPA told me that the adage about technically where all drinking dinosaur pee is kind of true. It's a new tab, which will open right after a quick break. But first, we wanted to remind you that close-all tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kqed.org slash podcast. Okay, after the break, sure we're all technically drinking dinosaur pee. So why not use waste water for data centers? Stick around. Support for KQED podcasts comes from San Francisco Opera. Manon is young, beautiful, and has a taste for the finer things. But when she suddenly falls in love, she must decide between what she values most, true

16:34love, or a per-region life of luxury. Masson A's Manon on stage, October 15th through November 1st. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Stanford's Master of Liberal Arts program, inviting students on a part-time journey of ideas, culminating in a Stanford graduate degree. An info session will be held on October 22nd, mla.stanford.edu. Welcome back. Let's open a new tab. Can data centers use recycled water? Reusing waste water is not new. So these water treatment facilities, they take recycled water and they use various different complex technologies that cannot explain to you, like membrane bio-reactors, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light, and other processes where they're treating water

17:34until it's clean enough for industrial use. And Bruno Pee got the guy formerly in charge of wastewater at the EPA. People demand us something really interesting. I keep saying EPAX is just cool that he used to be so high up in the government, but he is the executive director of the Water Reuse Association. He told me that sometimes water treatment facilities can sanitize water to such a degree that they actually have to add minerals back into it because people aren't used to the taste of water without minerals. I guess it would taste weird to us if we drank like 1000% sanitized water. They have the technology to do it. We actually don't need the recycled water to be ultra sanitized to use it. We already safely use recycled waste water, collected from municipal storm drains, flushing toilets, and industrial sites. Water treatment for industrial mining, for example, doesn't need to be as clean as the water

18:35we use for irrigating farms. There's different levels of sanitization, obviously, where it's like if you think about the water that you would use to water your plants maybe isn't the same water that you're drinking. It doesn't need to be as clean as drinking water. And it's the same with data centers where it doesn't need to be like the cleanest, most pristine water. And wouldn't you rather have that kind of water available for people to consume it? So then if this is a genuine possibility, why are data centers and local communities still fighting for the same drinking water? I think it's just not a priority for government to set up the infrastructure to recycle water and turn it into more sanitized versions of water that can be used for various other things. But it does exist in some places. So that's why, as we mentioned earlier, Loudon County in Virginia,

19:35because that's such a hub for data centers. And this is such a huge burden on the water in that region. They have invested in making these water recycling plants where they can sanitize water to the point that it is clean enough that it can be used to cool data centers safely. To better understand water recycling, Amanda talked to another expert. Dr. Gretazorns, who is the practice leader for water reuse at the engineering firm CDM Smith. So basically she is in charge of thinking about how we are engineering data centers and how we can create data centers that are built so that they're able to use recycled water and have that kind of infrastructure like this is what she does every day. And she's been working in water reuse for more than two decades, but she said that now literally every day she's working on recycled

20:36water for data centers. And as Dr. Zorns told Amanda, it's not as simple as just building a new wastewater treatment plant for every new data center. If you're rebuilding a city from scratch right now, that city will probably be more easily able to have those sorts of recycled water setups than if you're in New York City and you're like, let me replace this infrastructure from the 1800s or something. The truth is, right now, we just don't have the infrastructure for all the data centers in the country to exclusively use recycled water. But there is some hope for us. Amanda said there are people working with tech companies and local governments to build out this infrastructure. And she talked to one of them. So Michael Obradovich, who is the president of data center global accounts at EGLAB, he thinks that data centers could actually be something that drives the creation

21:36of more recycled water infrastructure. So maybe even though data centers are kind of seen as being very bad for the environment, maybe in a way that could spur some construction of things that do help us with conserving resources, but it's kind of a small victory that's not really a victory in the greater scheme. On the legislation side, Bruno Pee got former EPA guy is pushing for the advancing water reuse act. That's a bill that would provide a hefty tax credit to incentivize industries to scale their water recycling. And some tech companies are already investing in this infrastructure. Meta for one, announced that they're putting $270 million into waste water infrastructure projects in areas they're building new data centers. That sounds like really amazing, like $270 million. But then when you think about it, Meta just got fined $17 million for child

22:42safety issues and then they spend $4 million on reality labs each quarter for the last several years, like literally every quarter on the Meta quarterly earnings sheet, it's like we lost $4 billion on reality labs and reality labs is the division where they build like the VRAR stuff. So it's not like Meta is being unbelievably generous, but $270 million is not nothing and it helps and Amazon is doing something similar and trying to power its data centers with more recycled water. This does seem to be like something where tech companies do understand that there is a really significant environmental risk here or maybe they just understand that it's like a reputational risk where they don't want to be seen as perpetuating that. But if the reputational risk is what's getting them to invest in it, then like sure, I guess. That reputational risk is huge right now.

23:47People in this country love to argue, but today there's one issue that a majority of Americans can agree on, hating data centers. And we have just enough time to open one last tab, the great American Data Center backlash. We've talked about all the reasons peeing on data centers wouldn't work, but aside from just being very catchy, this video blew up for a reason. In echoes, a sentiment felt across the country, an issue uniting Americans beyond party lines. Nobody wants a data center in their backyard. Open AI released Chatchy BT in 2022. LLMs, large language models, were just the start. When the AI industry started really taking off a few years ago, developers and tech companies alike

24:47sold data centers as the future of industry. They made grand promises of creating jobs and investing in local communities. But as we've talked about before on close-all tabs, there hasn't been much follow-through on these promises. Instead, residents have raised concerns over skyrocketing utility bills, health issues, and unrelenting noise pollution. Data center popularity is in the toilet. A recent Gallup poll found that seven out of ten Americans opposed data centers in their area. And it's bipartisan. Pew research numbers published this month show that over half of Republicans and about two-thirds of Democrats say they'd be not comfortable with a new local data center. People just don't want these giant industrial centers that make a lot of noise and represent a kind of technology that maybe there isn't a great sentiment toward. Like they just don't want that in their neighborhood. And I think the sentiment toward AI is generally moving more

25:50negative. In the last few months, there's been a massive cultural vibe shift against AI as a whole. Another Pew Research study, published in August, found that 52% of Americans said they're, quote, more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life. In 2021, it was only 37%. And creators who accept AI sponsorships and use AI in their content, they're losing followers. One of the biggest internet scandals of the summer was an influencer brand trip sponsored by OpenAI. OpenAI just took influencers on a luxury trip with beekeeping and $5,000 a night sweets while they're building a $500 billion dollar data center that's about to suck power from your grid. The amount of sort of damage control that tech companies are having to do shows that in a way, you could say that the average people that are frustrated with AI are starting

26:56to gain some ground. Like I'm thinking about how there was recent backlash against the YouTuber slash writer slash general internet guy, Hank Green, when someone called him out for using the phrase, I appreciate the pushback in a video. A better way to say it and I appreciate the pushback is a word easy human invention. That's just a phrase that people say, but it is also something that AI says a lot and then someone accused him of using AI. And he kind of taddled on himself where he was like that actually wasn't AI. I was just appreciating that someone pushed back on something, but I have been using AI in a way that I feel is kind of unhealthy and then he talked about it and people felt really, really betrayed, but the reaction to the Hank Green situation shows that people really do think that's that bad. There isn't really a sense of nuance and I don't think that we've gotten to a space culturally where we have clear rules around what is good or bad AI use.

28:04Some people think that using it at all whatsoever is like sacrilegious, cancel you, whatever. And I don't blame people for feeling that way when the way that they're seeing how AI is impacting them is it's taking my job and there's this giant loud thing in my backyard. Do you think the people calling the shots in Silicon Valley are aware of that? Like, are they aware of the PR nightmare they're facing? They've been trying to sell us this incredibly powerful game-changing technology that's supposed to help humanity, but like most people know it for wow, this makes it harder to get a job. I think that when tech people don't realize how out of touch with the rest of the world they are, they kind of corner themselves into these marketing nightmares. It kind of reminds me of how crypto was rolled out to the world where the actual blockchain technology has uses, but people don't know what the technology is. They know like meme coins and Jimmy Fallon

29:09spending on gardening amounts of money on a little JPEG of an ape. People associate crypto with scams and that kind of ruined a lot of innovation in that space. And I think similarly with AI, it's like a lot of things that we do on the internet all the time already are AI. Like, when you make stickers on iMessage, that is using an AI algorithm to determine like where the edges of the object is so that it can delete the background or like most journalists have been using some form of AI interview transcribing tool for the last several years. I started using one in 2020 probably. And I think that sometimes people don't know exactly how to distinguish between a writer using AI in the sense of putting an audio file of an interview into something that will transcribe it for you versus using AI to be like,

30:11help me write my article, which is not necessarily ethical in my opinion. So considering everything we've covered, the intricacies of cooling data centers of P, you know, the current sentiments around AI, the marketing tactics, what do you want listeners to take away from this episode? I think that when it comes to AI in general, not everybody is an expert on AI, nor do they have to be like, that's just not everyone's responsibility. But I do think that at least having a basic level of education around how AI works, how LLMs function, things like people understanding that LLMs are creating the most likely response to a query where it's working from a matter of probability as opposed to rightness. I think some of these things are starting to seep into like the general knowledge pool, then it empowers people to understand more about what AI

31:18is and how it's affecting them. Because I think that for me knowing how LLMs work makes me a little bit less afraid of them. So educate yourself. Don't mail your p to Jason Kelsey. Unless if Jason Kelsey really wants you to, I think he was joking. I'll go on record and say I think Jason Kelsey was joking. And with that, let's close all these tabs. Close All Taps is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and Kayla Michalovich. It was edited by Chris Hamburg. The Close All Taps team also includes audio engineer, friend and willer and senior editor Chris Agusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon, additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Mahasanaan. Jen Cheean is executive

32:19director of podcasts and Ethan Toven Lindsay is our editor in chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California, local. This episode's keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white apple maker, High 75 Keyboard, with Fogrid and Red Samurai keycaps and Gator on Milky Yellow Pro V2 Switches. This episode also includes clips from YouTubers, Lewis LaBonte and Hank Green. And of course, clips from Liquid Death, Garage Beer and Jason Kelsey's song, Want Your P. Do you like these deep dives? Are you closing your tabs? Then don't forget to rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. Thanks for listening. My brother was staying with me. A Dark Knight, a quiet house, but inside danger was lurking. Oh, not really. We have Xfinity Shield, so we're not worried. What if protecting your home and devices could be drama free? Xfinity, imagine that. Restrictions apply not available in all areas.

33:24Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Stanford's Master of Liberal Arts program, inviting students on a part-time journey of ideas, culminating in a Stanford graduate degree. An info session will be held on October 22nd, mla.stanford.edu. Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop, because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in-store and online now at lululemon.com. So I feel like he really got to see what my job is like where I'm like, oh, I need to log on early to take this call about P with a guy that used to work for the EPA.