“AI’s water problem is worse than we thought”, 25 November 2025

Everyone knows data centers use a lot of water. What’s less known is how they can poison the drinking water that remains.

It’s already happening in eastern Oregon, according to a new bombshell investigation from Rolling Stone and the Food and Environment Reporting Network…

… At its data centers in Morrow County, Amazon is using water that’s already contaminated with industrial agriculture fertilizer runoff to cool down its ultra-hot servers. When that contaminated water hits Amazon’s sizzling equipment, it partially evaporates—but all the nitrate pollution stays behind. That means the water leaving Amazon’s data centers is even more concentrated with pollutants than what went in.

After that extra-contaminated water leaves Amazon’s data center, it then gets dumped and sprayed across local farmland in Oregon. From there, the contaminated water soaks straight into the aquifer that 45,000 people drink from.

The result is that people in Morrow County are now drinking from taps loaded with nitrates, with some testing at 40, 50, even 70 parts per million...

[Read the full report here]