The Year in Water, 2025 – Power Shift

In 2011, when the U.S. economy was still dazed by the Great Recession shockwave, Marc Andreessen, an influential venture capitalist and tech luminary, wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Andreessen, who founded the Netscape web browser in the early days of the public internet, argued that the leading U.S. tech companies – industry veterans like Microsoft and Apple, plus comparative newcomers such as Amazon and Google – were the vanguard of an economic revolution. Their digital products were toppling the business models of the analog era. “Software,” he declared, “is eating the world.”

Andreessen hit the mark. The tech revolution he identified has remade economies and societies. In recent years Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and their peers have continued churning, gathering speed, and expanding in new directions. Software did indeed eat the world. And now, with data centers rising like mushrooms after a storm, it’s hardware’s turn at the table.

The AI revolution is to blame. Massive amounts of computing power are needed to train and run AI models. Boosters proclaim world-changing outcomes. Detractors find it difficult to wade through the slop. Boom or bust, the investments and resources dedicated to AI today have profound implications not only for workers and economic growth. The magnitude of this change will influence the future of the world’s energy use – and by extension, its water and its climate.

Looking back, 2025 is the year that the pace and scale of the AI boom and its natural resource implications came into sharp focus for the public and policymakers.

It is hard to understate the heights of the AI transformation happening now. In investment terms, the closest comparison might be the railroad mania of the late 19th century. The $500 billion Stargate project in the U.S. is one piece of what is projected to be a multitrillion-dollar global buildout of computing infrastructure in the next few years. In energy terms, AI is a voracious beast. The data centers at the heart of it, especially those that train new AI models, require prodigious loads of electricity. Industry observers again grasp at historical comparisons that reach back generations.

“We’re really talking about load growth that we have not seen in this country since we tried to electrify rural America and put a refrigerator and washing machine in everybody’s house,” said Abe Silverman, an energy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, referring to the post-World War Two era. “The speed at which these new loads are coming on is so intense, and the political interest and economic development and AI expansion is so intense that we’re really running into a challenge that the system can’t expand fast enough to meet the new load.”

In a December 2024 report, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4 percent of U.S. electricity. That number could rise, the report said, to 6.7 percent and 12 percent by 2028. A year later, energy experts say that the trend line is probably tracking the higher end of that range.

A closer look at the numbers reveals why. The electricity demand for a single new AI-training data center is 1 gigawatt or more. That’s more electricity than the entire state of Wyoming consumes. Hundreds of such facilities are in various stages of development.

The surge is most vigorous in the U.S. But it is also a global phenomenon. In October, Google announced a $15 billion data center hub in southern India, the company’s largest outside its home country. One consultancy expects data center capacity in the six Middle Eastern countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council to triple by 2030. China is the world’s second-largest source of data center electricity demand, and it is projected to rise at a faster rate than in the U.S.

The energy demand in this computing revolution is important for many reasons, but especially for the world’s water and climate.

Data center equipment generates heat that must be removed. Often water is used as a coolant, and this has driven up local water use. Zero-water or low-water options exist, but they increase energy use, which has both carbon and water implications. The electricity that powers the data centers, if it comes from sources other than wind and solar, consumes water when it is generated. The water embedded in energy use for data centers is a much larger number than the water used in direct cooling operations. Exact numbers are difficult to acquire; companies tend to guard facility-level data.

These inputs are more than an accounting exercise. Already, the world is off track on its climate goals. Carbon emissions in 2025 are expected to reach a record high, according to Global Carbon Budget, a research group. Utilities like Arizona Public Service have announced new natural gas power plants to meet growing data center energy demand. Data centers in 2024 accounted for only 0.5 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. But it is one of the few sectors that is growing rapidly. By 2030, in a mid-range scenario, data centers account for 1 percent of global emissions.

A carbon-intensive data center buildout would make a risky global climate even riskier. Research published earlier this year found that multi-year droughts globally are “increasing in occurrence, frequency, and severity.” In Iran, the worst drought in decades has exposed dismal failures in its water management approach. The country is in a full-on crisis. Its reservoirs are on the brink of drying up and its president is talking about moving the capital from Tehran. Warming oceans, meanwhile, have fueled the rapid intensification of tropical storms, which are battering vulnerable coastal regions, especially Southeast Asia this year.

As data center hardware is eating the world, public resistance is growing. The City Council in Tucson, Arizona, citing residents’ water concerns, rejected a proposed data center in August. In Delaware, the New Castle County Council is debating data center regulations. Minnesota passed a law in June that applies stricter water permitting for data centers using more than 100 million gallons annually. Georgia strengthened its public review process.

Which is not to say that AI and its derivatives are only to be feared. Already these tools are proving to be valuable. AI models are fine-tuning weather and river-flow forecasts. Google’s Flood Hub is giving officials earlier warnings of flood risk. Add sensor data, and water utilities are using high-end computing power to identify leaks and optimize capacity in their sewage systems in order to reduce spills and cut costs.

The other bit of good news is that renewable energy sources are also experiencing bumper times. Globally, electricity generation from renewable energy – including solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass – exceeded that from coal for the first time ever in the first half of 2025. In the U.S., the federal government’s energy researchers say that solar photovoltaic is in many cases the cheapest source of new electricity.

These energy, water, and carbon calculations for data centers represent an intrusion of reality in an industry whose visions of the future can seem unbounded. This year was a reminder that the virtual worlds that lie behind our computer and cell phone screens have a direct foothold in the physical world. If software and now hardware are eating the world, it is not only obsolete business models that are part of the buffet. It is also the stuff of life: minerals and metals, land and water.

The Trump administration brought quick changes to U.S. water and health policy. The Environmental Protection Agency moved to cancel Biden-era regulations on four PFAS in drinking water. The selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a fluoride skeptic, as the U.S. health secretary resulted in cities and states rejecting the dental health supplement. Utah’s governor signed a law banning municipalities from fluoridating their water.

Internationally, war and conflict were major contributors to waterborne health problems. In Sudan, cholera cases are rising alongside a horrific civil war that has displaced perhaps 12 million people and incapacitated drinking water and sanitation systems. Through mid-October, the Sudan health ministry had counted at least 3,300 deaths from the disease. In Gaza, where clean water is scarce and sanitation systems have been destroyed in the war, waterborne illness is rampant.

The misery in Sudan and Gaza is part of a larger trend. The number of water-related conflicts rose by 20 percent in 2024, according to the Pacific Institute, a research group. In Madagascar, youth-led protests for better governance and basic needs like water and energy resulted in a military coup that ousted President Andry Rajoelina. When water systems are damaged or destroyed or do not exist, human health suffers.

The year is ending with the Colorado River at a critical juncture.

The big reservoirs Mead and Powell remain perilously low and the seven states that share the basin have been unable to agree on cuts that would reduce their reliance on the shrinking river.

Reservoir operating rules expire at the end of 2026. If no agreement is reached the federal government could step in, or the states could take their chances in court. It’s a risky move that no one in principle seems to want. Yet brinkmanship and entrenched positions have stymied compromise.

The basin’s Indian tribes, which collectively have rights to more than a quarter of its recent average annual flow, are adamant that their interests – and more broadly, the river itself – be protected. “Any progress made in the negotiations to date is merely rationing a reduced supply, not actively managing and augmenting it as a shared resource with strategies and tools that can benefit the entire basin,” the leaders of the Gila River Indian Community wrote on November 12.

The Colorado River Indian Tribes, whose riverside reservation includes lands in Arizona and California, voted in November to extend legal personhood to the river under tribal law.

Donald Trump returned to the Presidency promising retribution, deregulation, and his view of America first. Promises made, promises kept.

One of the administration’s most consequential actions was the day-one decision to eliminate most foreign aid and the agency that carried out that work.

The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development “left a trail of broken engagements, unfinished infrastructure, weakened institutions, and diminished water security,” writes David Michel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Modeling from Brooke Nichols at Boston University estimates an additional 660,000 deaths to date – from malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, malnutrition, and neglected tropical diseases – due to the USAID shutdown.

The EPA, meanwhile, promoted AI investment, energy development, and car manufacturing jobs. The agency is extending or canceling deadlines for polluting industries. It is attempting to undo regulations on four PFAS in drinking water. But it did accelerate the timeline for cleaning up sewage pollution in the Tijuana River.

Large, windowless boxes are multiplying at the edges of cities, in the high plains, on scrublands – any place that wants a foothold in the Next Big Thing.

The race to develop more powerful AI models, backed wholeheartedly in the U.S. by the Trump administration, is spurring the largest capital investment in generations.

Amid the buildout, data centers are encountering public pushback due to natural resource demands. Though small compared to agriculture, their water use has strained local water supplies or exceeded water utility service capacity. Their energy requirements have utilities scrambling to add electricity generating capacity to the grid.

Ecosystems are always under pressure.

Some of that pressure comes from humankind dumping heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere.

This extra heat has caused the pace of glacial melting to increase. “What is rather alarming is the acceleration and the increasing amount of ice we lose,” said Michael Zemp, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service. Retreating glaciers are a flood risk for mountain communities. They contribute to sea-level rise, but also nourish rivers downstream.

Other pressures are the result of bad management decisions. A study published in September found that deforestation in the Amazon is responsible for three-fourths of the rainforest’s declining dry-season precipitation. Ecologists warn of a tipping point when the rainforest will no longer be able to sustain itself.

In the United Kingdom, sewage pollution of its rivers and streams is a pervasive problem. Lawmakers there approved a measure that gives regulators more tools in the fight. All sewage outfalls will be monitored and bonuses can be withheld from utility executives if their companies do not meet pollution standards.

More than 22 million acres in Canada burned this year, the second highest annual total for the country in the last four decades. The European Union experienced its worst fire year in the last two decades. Much of the damage has occurred in Portugal, where three times more acres burned than average.

In July, large fires cut through Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey. Half the island of Kythira burned. Earlier this year, the Eaton and Palisades fires blitzed Los Angeles County, destroying 16,246 structures and killing 31 people.

All the burning and scorching is also turning out to be ruinous for water systems, both natural and man-made. Water puts out fire, but increasingly water is threatened by flame.

One of the world’s largest stores of surface fresh water, the Great Lakes are facing a host of new pressures.

A warming climate is making lake habitats more welcoming to non-native species. Harmful algal blooms, long a problem in Lake Erie, are appearing more frequently in the warming waters of Lake Superior and its feeder rivers. Invasive mussels that are threatening to wipe out native whitefish in other lakes are closer to establishing a foothold in Superior.

On top of the climate and development pressures, the Trump administration’s interference in scientific research and funding is jeopardizing gains in lake management and ecosystem restoration.

The Great Lakes and the industries that developed around them form a regional “blue economy.”

The treasure trove of clean fresh water is seen as a competitive edge in a region hungry for growth and whose leaders boast about exporting the scientific breakthroughs and infrastructure hardware to solve the world’s water challenges. 

Great Lakes officials are promoting their ecologically stable and water-rich region as a sensible place to do business in the 21st century and beyond. 

The five partners of the Great Lakes News Collaborative — Bridge Michigan, Circle of Blue, Great Lakes Now, Michigan Public, and The Narwhal — investigated a question central to the region’s future: how can states, provinces, and tribal nations steward their water to provide jobs and attract businesses without inflicting the severe ecological damage that was a ruinous hallmark of earlier periods of development?

Farms are the biggest polluters of U.S. waterways. In many basins, including highly stressed western watersheds like the Colorado River and California’s Central Valley, they are also the biggest water users.

These two attributes – quality and quantity – will always place farming near the center of water policy debates.

Farmers in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas persuaded the Trump administration to intervene in Mexico’s tardy deliveries of water in the shared basin. In Kansas, meanwhile, a small group of farmers continued to prove that self-imposed groundwater pumping restrictions were not an obstacle to profitability or better environmental outcomes.

In other states and countries, farm runoff polluted with nutrients and pesticides was the target of lawsuits, research, and permitting decisions. The World Health Organization declared that atrazine, one of the most common weedkillers in the U.S., probably causes cancer in humans.

Circle of Blue introduced a new opinion column in 2025. Written by senior editor Keith Schneider, the column tracked the Trump administration’s actions on water and the environment.

The entries have range and scope, matching the administration’s relentless attempts to weaken the federal bureaucracy and handcuff its data-gathering and oversight capacity.

“Make no mistake,” Schneider writes. “The administration’s work to strip the EPA of its expertise and authority is dangerous in almost every conceivable way. It will allow more toxins in air and water, more damage to land from industrial operations, and more hazards for people, plants, and animals.”