Liquid Death‘s tongue-in-cheek campaign with former Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce suggests sending pee to data centers to cool AI servers, complete with a jingle about saving humanity by peeing on computers. The commercial is satire, but it points at a real engineering practice: data centers are increasingly using recycled water, produced by treating wastewater and sewage, as an alternative to potable drinking water for cooling.

The joke is technically wrong in its literal form. Bruno Pigott, executive director of the WateReuse Association and former acting assistant administrator in water for the U.S. EPA, told TechCrunch that raw urine contains salts, urea, bacteria, and organic matter that would leave deposits and require constant cleaning. Evaporative cooling passes air through water, and pouring untreated urine into that process is not practical. The actual approach uses existing wastewater and sewage infrastructure, treating water with membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light, and other processes until it is clean enough for industrial use. In some cases that water can even be made drinkable, though large-scale recycled-water use for data center cooling is the more common industrial application.

The economics explain. Dr. Green wants Zornes, practice leader for water reuse at engineering firm CDM Smith, said recycled water has been used for industrial cooling for decades, and rising data center demand has made the practice much more central: every city today she works on recycled water for data centers. The main constraint is physical and infrastructure-based: a data center must be near a substantially large wastewater treatment plant. In rural areas, local wastewater plants often process only enough water for the data center to draw from. Building that infrastructure takes time.

Loudoun County, Virginia, shows the scale of the challenge. The county is home to more than 250 data centers, with at least another two dozen planned. As of 2025, data centers there used about 200 million gallons of recycled water per day, roughly 43% of daily data center water usage, while the remaining 260 million gallons needed for about 57% came from potable water supplies, according to Loudoun Water. Some companies are starting to act as avatars for water infrastructure: Meta, for example, plans to invest at least $270 million in wastewater infrastructure projects near its data centers. Advocacy, meanwhile, includes support for a 30% tax credit to accelerate industrial recycled-water infrastructure building.

The commercial ultimately reflects a broader public concern rather than a literal technical solution. A Gallup poll cited in the article finds about seven in ten Americans oppose data centers in their communities, and data-center water use is one of the visible environmental pressures. The article is clear that no one should actually direct pee to a data center; the useful, mature practice is treating the municipal wastewater stream that urine enters and using the cleaned product as industrial cooling water.