Oracle says its new AI data centers will not draw on local water day to day for cooling. In a February 9, 2026 explainer, the company said the AI data centers it is building in New Mexico, Michigan, Wisconsin and Texas use direct-to-chip, closed-loop, non-evaporative cooling: the loop is filled once, the liquid recirculates, and “ongoing community water usage for cooling the data center is effectively zero.” What remains is ordinary building use from kitchens and restrooms, which Oracle compares to a typical office building.
“Zero water” in Oracle’s language therefore means zero water consumed by the cooling process after the first fill. It does not mean the buildings never take water from the local supply, and the published numbers show exactly where the difference lies.
How much water does an Oracle AI data center use?
The most detailed public figures come from Abilene, Texas, the flagship Stargate campus that OpenAI says is already up and running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Crusoe, which develops the site, published the water numbers in an August 5, 2025 post on the campus:
- One-time fill: one million gallons of water per building, from the municipal supply, across eight buildings.
- Ongoing cooling use: about 50,000 gallons per building per year, drained and replaced during routine pump and chiller maintenance and water-quality work.
- Heat rejection: handled by air-cooled chillers, so, in Crusoe’s words, the facility “does not consume any water as part of the heat-rejection process.”
Crusoe notes that 50,000 gallons is less than the roughly 100,000 gallons an average American household uses in a year, citing the EPA. For contrast, Oracle’s February explainer points to an Uptime Institute benchmark estimating that a conventional evaporative cooling system can use on the order of millions of gallons a year for each megawatt of IT load, because the evaporated water has to be continually replaced.
How the closed loop works
Oracle explains the design with a car radiator. Coolant runs through sealed pipes to the servers, absorbs the heat at the processors themselves, then flows to outdoor heat exchangers where fans push air across coils. The cooled liquid goes back around. “The heat leaves the building; cooling liquid does not,” Oracle’s explainer says, adding that there is no evaporation, no blowdown and no continuous makeup water, and that top-offs happen only under abnormal conditions.
The claim is older than the February post. In an October 14, 2025 technical note, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure executives Pradeep Vincent and Ram Nagappan described direct-to-chip liquid cooling paired with “dry coolers and closed-loop chiller systems that operate with zero water wastage” as part of the design for gigawatt-scale AI superclusters.
Where Oracle is building with this design
- Abilene, Texas: the flagship Stargate site described above, plus a potential 600 megawatt expansion nearby, per OpenAI’s September 23, 2025 announcement.
- Shackelford County, Texas, and Doña Ana County, New Mexico: two of the Oracle-developed Stargate sites named in that same announcement.
- Port Washington, Wisconsin: the Lighthouse campus, announced October 22, 2025 by OpenAI, Oracle and Vantage Data Centers. Vantage says it will have four data centers with close to a gigawatt of AI capacity, a closed-loop liquid cooling system “that uses minimal water,” and investment in local water restoration projects so the campus restores more water than it consumes.
- Saline Township, Michigan: a campus Oracle will operate for OpenAI. Oracle’s December 18, 2025 statement says it will use closed-loop, non-evaporative cooling with a tank that “only needs to be filled once.”
The trade-off the companies do name
None of these sources publishes a figure for how much extra electricity, if any, the closed-loop design costs compared with evaporative cooling, so we will not guess at one. Vantage goes the other way and says its Wisconsin system “drives significant energy savings.” The cost the sources do concede is money: Crusoe says closed-loop systems are “typically not deployed at this scale due to increased lifecycle and maintenance costs,” and that it chose to bear those costs for the water savings.
Power is the other half of every one of these community conversations. For Saline Township, Oracle says it will pay 100% of the campus energy costs, including battery storage, plus new transmission lines and an onsite substation. It also says DTE Energy has stated the contract will not raise rates for existing customers. The Michigan Public Service Commission approved the contracts on December 18, 2025, according to Oracle.
What has happened since February
On September 28, 2026, Detroit station WJR reported that Oracle officials repeated the same commitments for the Saline campus: closed-loop, non-evaporative cooling with a one-time water fill, Oracle paying its own electricity costs, and investment in reliability upgrades and emissions-free battery storage. The water claim has not changed in the seven months since the explainer; the open question is now delivery, since the Wisconsin campus is not scheduled for completion until 2028, per Vantage.
Why a small business near one of these sites should care
Where we land: the numbers above are what a local owner needs before a zoning meeting, and they are more useful than either the “data centers drink a town’s water” headline or the “zero water” one. A restaurant, a farm, a car wash or a landscaper that depends on the municipal supply should care about two different figures. The first is the one-time fill and where it comes from: Oracle’s explainer says the loop is initially filled with water delivered by tanker, while Crusoe says the Abilene fill came from the municipal supply. The second is the yearly maintenance use, which at Abilene is smaller than a household’s, and it is the one Oracle’s “effectively zero” refers to.
It is also worth remembering that most of the AI tools a small business uses, from chat assistants to the features inside accounting and scheduling software, run in buildings like these. Our practical guide to AI for small business covers what those tools are worth paying for. For work you would rather keep off anyone else’s servers entirely, we looked at AI models small enough to run on hardware you own.
Questions about Oracle data center water usage
Do Oracle’s AI data centers use water for cooling?
Only for the initial fill and occasional maintenance. Oracle says its AI data centers in New Mexico, Michigan, Wisconsin and Texas use direct-to-chip, closed-loop, non-evaporative cooling that is filled once and recirculates, so ongoing community water use for cooling is effectively zero. (Source: Oracle, February 9, 2026)
How much water does the Abilene Stargate data center use?
Crusoe, the developer, says each of the eight buildings needs a one-time fill of one million gallons, then about 50,000 gallons per building per year for maintenance and water quality, with heat removed by air-cooled chillers. (Source: Crusoe, August 5, 2025)
Will Oracle’s Michigan data center raise local electric bills?
Oracle says it will pay 100% of the Saline Township campus energy costs, and that DTE Energy has stated the contract will not raise rates for existing customers. (Source: Oracle, December 18, 2025)
If one of these campuses is coming to your county, three questions get you the real numbers at the next public hearing: how many gallons the first fill takes and whether it comes from the town supply or by tanker, how many gallons a year the cooling loop uses after that, and who pays for the new power lines and substation.
