Ok, can we actually cool data centers with our pee? | TechCrunch

Jason Kelce joked that people should cool data centers with their pee, rather than potable water -- his suggestion is not completely ludicrous.

In a cheeky marketing campaign, Liquid Death teamed up with former Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce to share a solution to mitigate the environmental impact of AI data centers, which require massive quantities of water to prevent servers from overheating.

“AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water,” Kelce quips in the video campaign. “That’s why Liquid Death and Garage Beer have teamed up. We want your pee to cool these data centers.”

Then, as a crowd of people walk through a field sipping their branded beverages, they sing in unison: “Let’s pee on computers together to save humanity!”

It’s a funny commercial. What’s even funnier is that Kelce has unwittingly stumbled upon a real tactic for cooling down data centers.

“The Liquid Death commercial is funny and tongue-in-cheek,” Michael Obradovitch, vice president of Data Center Global Accounts at Ecolab, told TechCrunch. “But in reality, there is a fair amount of alternative water sources already being used to a similar extent to cool these data centers.”

Loudoun County, Virginia, located outside of Washington, D.C., is home to more than 250 data centers, with plans to construct at least another two dozen. As of 2025, Loudoun data centers collectively used about 200 million gallons of recycled water each day, but the water footprint of these data centers is so extreme that this only accounts for 43% of daily data center water usage in the area. The other 260 million gallons, or 57% of daily data center water usage, come from potable water supplies, according to Loudoun Water.

“There’s a lot of infrastructure that has to be built out and usually isn’t existing today, and that takes time” Zornes said. “That’s one of the problems — it’s just the time that it takes to get that done.”

Obradovitch thinks that the AI industry could even drive resources toward building out this kind of infrastructure to scale water treatment. Meta, for example, will invest at least $270 million in wastewater infrastructure projects near its data centers (the company also loses about $4 billion each quarter on its Reality Labs division).

“That’s where data centers can actually come in and be anchors of water infrastructure,” Obradovitch said. “There’s a number of cases and examples where data centers, as part of their engagement with communities, have committed funding and capital to some of these municipalities to help in addressing some of those exact challenges.”

On the policy side, Pigott is advocating for legislation that would provide a 30% tax credit to help industries scale their recycled water infrastructure.

“We think it would greatly accelerate the pace with which data centers and other industries entered into this area,” he said.

While there’s some unintentional science behind Liquid Death’s joke, the commercial and its virality serve as a reminder to the tech industry that the environmental demands of data centers have become a mainstream concern. According to a recent Gallup poll, about seven out of ten Americans oppose data centers in their communities, and AI products continue to face backlash from consumers who feel as though the technology is being forced into their lives.

“I’m glad that people are concerned about water, and anything that raises awareness of water, however crude it may be, could actually be beneficial,” Pigott said. “It gives us a chance to educate the public about what we’re doing today.”