Every AI data center drinks twice: once through its cooling systems and again through the power plants that feed it. New reporting from WITF lays out how that double draw works in Pennsylvania, and why the scientists watching it say nobody is adding up the total.
An October 14 WITF report on AI data centers in Pennsylvania finds the facilities tap water for cooling and, indirectly, through electricity generation, with ripple effects on public supplies, infrastructure, and farmland. Bucknell watershed scientist Benjamin Hayes says there is no single clearinghouse reviewing projects cumulatively, so several facilities can land in one watershed with each judged as if it stood alone. Pennsylvania’s new budget law now requires data centers to report annual water and power use, with fines of $10,000 a day for skipping the paperwork.
The water bill nobody itemizes
The WITF piece, built on interviews with two Bucknell University researchers, walks through why Pennsylvania is a magnet for the industry: energy resources and a short haul to East Coast markets. Computer scientist Brian King notes the GPU racks inside draw enormous power, and the water footprint follows from there. Cooling is the visible part. The larger share often hides upstream in the thermoelectric plants generating the electricity, plus new infrastructure, pressure on public water systems, and farm ground converted to industrial pads.
No one is keeping the running total
Hayes, who directs Bucknell’s Watershed Sciences and Engineering program, makes the point our partner groups have been making at hearings all year: projects get reviewed one at a time, but water adds up by watershed. He calls for regional analysis that weighs electricity and water demand together with drought, land use, and community needs before approvals pile up in a single basin. Anyone following the data center fights in Fayette County or along the upper Ohio will recognize the gap he is describing.
The fine a data center faces under Pennsylvania’s new reporting law for failing to file its annual water and energy use report.
What the new state law does, and does not do
Context for the reporting: the budget Governor Shapiro signed in July folded in Senate Bill 146, which requires data centers to report exact water and power usage to the state every year, with DEP publishing an annual report on aggregate trends and environmental impacts. A companion measure gives the Public Utility Commission authority to check the load forecasts utilities hand to PJM. Disclosure is not a limit, though. The reports will tell us how much water the industry is using after the fact, which is better than not knowing, but it is still accounting, not planning. The cumulative review Hayes describes remains nobody’s job.
Why it matters for the rest of us
Our basin is squarely in the industry’s sights, from proposed campuses on abandoned mine land to wetland fills along the Ohio. The useful move for a watershed group is to get ahead of the first application: know your stream’s existing withdrawals, ask permit reviewers the cumulative question in writing, and cite the new reporting law when you do. The data will exist now. Someone local still has to read it.
Based on reporting from WITF, October 14, 2026, with legislative background from Utility Dive, July 14, 2026. Current as of October 16, 2026.
