Here’s the thing about the water going into ChatGPT. It’s real water. It’s fresh. It’s drinkable. And most of the time, it’s not coming from anywhere near the person typing the question.
You are not paying for that water. Neither is OpenAI. Neither is Google, Microsoft, Meta, or Amazon, at least not in any way that resembles what the water is actually worth to the communities losing it. Someone else is paying, and if you have never heard their names, that’s because they aren’t the sort of people the AI industry finds it useful to talk about.
The families in Montevideo
In the first half of 2023, Uruguay was living through its worst drought in more than seventy years. Reservoirs supplying the capital ran dry. According to a Project Syndicate analysis by researchers Friederike Rohde and Paz Peña, republished by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in November 2025, the Uruguayan government’s response was to relax its drinking water standards and pump brackish water from the Río de la Plata estuary into the public supply.
For weeks, working-class families in Montevideo were boiling salty tap water and trying to make it drinkable for their children.
During those same weeks, the government granted Google permits to draw from the remaining fresh water reserves for a proposed data centre.
That is not a hypothetical. It is not a projection. It is what happened, in one specific city, in one specific year, to one specific set of families whose taps ran salt while a foreign tech company was licensed to take the fresh water they could not have.
The residents in Fayette County
Nothing about this pattern is limited to countries you might be tempted to describe as vulnerable. According to a Fortune investigation published in May 2026 by news editor Catherina Gioino, residents of an affluent subdivision in Fayette County, Georgia, spent most of 2024 noticing that their water pressure was tanking. Something was drawing enormous quantities of water from the same system that fed their homes.
The county utility eventually traced the problem to a 615-acre data centre campus called Project Excalibur, owned by a company that is itself owned by Blackstone. One of its water hookups had been installed without the utility even knowing it existed. Another was flowing unmetered and uncharged. By the time officials caught up, the developer had consumed 29 million gallons of local water without authorisation. The retroactive charge was roughly 147,000 dollars. No fine was imposed.
In Tucson, Arizona, where the city council had already voted unanimously to reject a proposed data centre because the region gets seven to ten inches of rain a year, a construction contractor obtained a permit for water inside the city’s service area, transported it outside city limits, and used approximately 650,000 gallons of it on the rejected project without authorisation. The city shut off the meter. Construction continued.
The women in Cerrillos
The most sustained resistance to any of this has come from a group of women in the working-class Cerrillos district of Santiago, Chile, who in 2019 formed a neighbourhood organisation called MOSACAT after learning that Google was planning to build a data centre in their community. The proposed facility was projected to consume 7.6 million litres of fresh water a day. That is roughly what their entire neighbourhood uses in a year.
MOSACAT read the environmental report themselves. They organised. They took the case to a Chilean court. And in September 2024, that court forced Google to redesign the cooling system and undergo a fresh environmental review.
They are still fighting.
Why is this happening?
The pieces that connect these stories, the reason the same arrangement keeps repeating from Montevideo to Fayette County to Santiago, the specific mechanism by which drought-stressed regions become attractive rather than off-limits to the world’s largest technology companies, and the actual scale of what is being taken, are the substance of the video attached to this piece.
It walks through where the water goes, how much of it never comes back, and the far larger number that almost nobody in the industry reports.
