The Technology Association of Iowa recently hosted the Iowa Data Center Summit, which was meant in part to ask how Iowa can balance demand for data centers and environmental responsibility. 

While moderating one of the panels at the summit, Tyler Wyngarden, TAI’s vice president of strategic partnerships, paused at one point, saying he was going to bring things to a “personal” level. 

“My mom says, ‘I’m worried we’re going to run out of water.’ What would you say?” he asked the panelists.

Dan Harbeke, public policy and government affairs manager for Google, said, “Google has a goal to replenish 120% of the water that we use, and we’re about 66% there today.”

He said in 2024, Google had 112 data center projects globally where it replenished 4.5 billion gallons of water.

Water and energy use have become keenly watched issues in Iowa as the state becomes a burgeoning site for data center growth, with 104 located in the state and 76 in the Des Moines area, according to Data Center Map, which maintains a database of data centers.

Currently in the U.S., data centers account for less than 0.1% of total water use. But consumption is expected to triple by 2030, according to McKinsey & Co. By 2033, 16% to 23% of U.S. electricity could be consumed by data centers, according to an Accenture report. 

Data centers are straining water resources in places like Texas, California and Virginia, and also “driving up the energy cost,” said Lu Liu, Iowa State University assistant professor in water resources engineering.

“When we are thinking about adding new locations or expansions [in Iowa], we have to think about the long-term impact of those data centers on the energy and water systems, because … the negative impact has been observed in other places,” she said.

Khara Boender, senior manager of state policy of the Data Center Coalition, a national membership association for the data center industry, said at the Data Center Summit there are two types of data centers represented across the coalition’s membership.

One group includes hyperscalers, facilities that are built for all of a company’s operations, such as the largest companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and even Visa, she said. The other group is multitenant, which might serve up to 200 different tenants.

“Both models are essential,” she said. “The hyperscale centers cover enormous demand for internal operations, while the multitenant centers offer flexibility for many businesses in our modern economy.”

Data centers have become “central to expanding lives in a modern economy,” she said.

She pointed to a Deloitte study that showed that the average household in the U.S. has 21 connected devices.

“Device use is going to generate twice as much data over the next 10 years as it did in the past five,” she said at the summit. “So we’re going to be generating twice as much data in half the time, and that obviously will require additional digital infrastructure.”  

The coalition has also learned that 95% of Fortune 500 companies rely on cloud infrastructure provided by data centers, Boender said.

“We also estimate that that number will continue to grow,” she said. “The last compounding factor here is that currently, only two-thirds of the global population is online and connected to the internet, but we expect the next third to come online in the next couple of decades, again, which will require even more data center infrastructure support.”

In 2022, there were 2,701 data centers in the U.S., according to Statista.com. By March 2024, the number had nearly doubled to 5,381.

Data centers in Iowa are “not necessarily” choosing to locate in areas with abundant water supplies, said Keith Schilling, the state geologist and director of the Iowa Geological Survey, located at the University of Iowa. 

“Our groundwater in Iowa, probably, likewise, around the country, is not evenly distributed,” he said. “So you may have a great location because of power or urban areas or all these other reasons, but groundwater doesn’t respect those boundaries.”

He said in cases like Des Moines, data centers don’t have access to abundant groundwater resources.

“In other areas, there’s a Google facility on the Missouri River floodplain near Council Bluffs,” he said. “That’s a great location. [The] Missouri River’s probably got 100, 150 feet of coarse sand and gravel supplied in some ways by the Missouri River flowing on top of it. That’s a pretty good place to use a lot of water.”

Microsoft has five data center sites, each with multiple buildings, in West Des Moines. The sites use between  2% to 7% of the water pumped monthly by West Des Moines Water Works. That compares to about 40% of the water pumped that is used for lawn watering and irrigation during peak usage times, which are typically summer months but can stretch from May through September.

Data for 2025, which is through September, shows Microsoft used 48,751,325 gallons of water to power its West Des Moines data centers. The water is used in a process called evaporative cooling, according to a spokesperson for  West Des Moines Water Works.

In June, West Des Moines Water Works officials said the lawn watering ban that went into effect this summer would have been implemented “regardless of data centers’ water usage.”

Christina Murphy, general manager of West Des Moines Water Works, was not available by deadline for comment, but has described Microsoft as a “great corporate partner” to West Des Moines Water Works. The tech company has invested $25 million in water infrastructure and storage including the Adams Street water tower and the new Aquifer Storage and Recovery Well in Valley View Park, according to the spokesperson.

Microsoft, which declined a request for an interview, wrote in a 2025 Environmental Sustainability Report that it has a goal of “becoming water positive by 2030.”

Among its efforts are to increase efficiency of water use. “Microsoft’s newest data centers feature advanced direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems that recycle water in a closed loop design, eliminating the need for evaporation,” the report said.  

Microsoft also wrote that it is “continually investing in improving the design and operation of our data centers to minimize water use, including implementing water recycling projects and rainwater harvesting.”

What’s next for water, energy use in Iowa

Wally Taylor, the conservation chair and legal chair for the Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group,  said he’s concerned about data centers on two levels.

“One is the need for energy, electric energy, and the other is the need for water,” he said.

He said in the group’s view the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ current process for granting water withdrawal permits does not sufficiently investigate whether granting a permit is appropriate. (Any entity that will use more than 25,000 gallons a day of water requires a permit from the DNR). 

“We don’t know what the status of our aquifers are, and DNR has just been handing out permits like candy without any investigation as to whether they really should be,” Taylor said.

Taylor said the Sierra Club proposed legislation during last year’s legislative session to revise or reform the DNR permitting process. The bill didn’t make it to the floor for a vote; the group will try again in the next session, he said. 

“[The group is also] going to propose, perhaps, a more focused bill on energy use and water withdrawal for data centers,” he said.

The Iowa DNR did not return a request for comment by deadline.

MidAmerican Energy said it experienced overall retail load growth across residential, business and commercial/industrial sectors, of 2.8% in 2023 and 1.5% in 2024. 

“We expect to realize an increase above [2023 and 2024 numbers] in 2025 due, in large part, to data center load growth,” Geoff Greenwood, media relations manager at MidAmerican Energy Co., said in an email.

Greenwood said MidAmerican closely tracks the amount of energy that its customers use now and in the near and long term.

He said the company proposed two generating projects earlier this year to help meet the growing demand.

“These two projects include our 800-megawatt Solar Reliability Project, which has been approved by the Iowa Utilities Commission and is planned to be placed in service in phases in 2027 and 2028, and the 518-MW Orient Energy Center, which is a proposed natural gas-powered generating plant that is still pending before the IUC,” Greenwood wrote. “If approved, we plan to place Orient in-service by the summer of 2028.”