Lead project · Research
How much water and power do Los Angeles data centers use?
Data centers are the buildings full of computers that run the internet and AI, and they need a lot of electricity and water to stay cool. Nobody had estimated, building by building, how much the ones around Los Angeles use. I made a list of them and worked out those estimates.
- Role
- Student Researcher
- Mentor
- Dr. Lorenzo Rosa, Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science
- When
- Jun 2026 to present
The question
Data centers usually show up in the news as a national or global number. People who live near one, and the utilities that supply it, care about something more local: how much water and power a specific building takes, and from which part of the grid.
I wanted those numbers for the Los Angeles area. I also went in with a hypothesis. I expected the facilities, and the strain they put on water and power, to sit mostly in underserved neighborhoods.
What I did
I started by building an inventory of every data center I could find in the Los Angeles area. That came to 67 facilities. For the 42 that had enough information to work with, I estimated how much water and energy each one uses and what that demand means for the local power grid. As far as I know, these are the first per-facility estimates for the region.
What I found
My hypothesis was wrong. The data centers cluster on industrial land, so the burden does not fall mainly on underserved neighborhoods the way I had expected.
The size of the biggest users surprised me more. A handful of these buildings use close to half of what an entire city's residents use in a day.
After I had worked out my method on my own, I learned that it already has a name. Accounting for the water and energy a facility takes in falls under industrial ecology and life cycle analysis, which are part of civil and environmental engineering. That is the field I want to study in college.
What's next
I am writing up the study for the Regeneron Science Talent Search, due in November 2026.
Under the hood
The study has three steps.
Inventory
A list of 67 data centers in the Los Angeles area. I modeled only the 42 with enough data to support an estimate and left the rest in the inventory.
Demand modeling
For each of the 42, an estimate of how much water and how much energy the facility uses.
Grid impact
The energy estimates, placed against the local power grid, to see how much load these facilities add.
This work is still in progress with Dr. Rosa. The full methods and per-facility results will be in my Regeneron Science Talent Search submission.