Cooling the Cloud: Considerations for Water Utilities Evaluating Data Center Development
AWWA’s new white paper offers tools, evaluation criteria, and practical resources to assist water utilities in most effectively evaluating potential data center development in their service areas.
Water Resources Planning & Sustainability
Cooling the Cloud: Considerations for Water Utilities Evaluating Data Center Development
Considerations for Water Utilities Evaluating Data Center Development
AWWA collaborated with Carollo Engineers to release a new report titled Cooling the Cloud: Considerations for Water Utilities Evaluating Data Center Development. This report builds on AWWA’s 2025 report Cooling the Cloud: Water Utilities in a Data-Driven World, which explored the implications of rapidly growing data center development for water utilities and the communities they serve.
Cooling the Cloud: Considerations for Water Utilities Evaluating Data Center Development offers tools, evaluation criteria, and practical resources to assist water utilities in most effectively evaluating potential data center development in their service areas. This report does not advocate in favor of or against data center development. Instead, it serves as a resource to help water utility professionals evaluate proposed data center projects objectively and comprehensively.
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Key Insights & Partners
- Gathering key project information early is critical for effective water and wastewater infrastructure planning. Early insight into proposed data center projects, operating requirements, and development schedules allows water utilities to most effectively assess potential service needs and facilitate reviews prior to capacity commitments or infrastructure investments.
- Transparency, ongoing communication, and coordination between utilities, developers, regulators, and other relevant stakeholders are critical to the successful integration of proposed data centers as high-demand water utility customers.
- Flexible planning approaches are needed to allow water utilities to tailor their decision-making to changing circumstances, local conditions, and community priorities.
The report includes several adaptable resources to assist water utilities in navigating data center development.
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