“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.”
These alternative water sources, when used in data centers, at least partially offset the demand for potable drinking water. One such alternative water source is recycled water, which is made by treating wastewater and sewage water so that they’re safe to use again. Wastewater and sewage water contain many things, including — you guessed it! — human urine.
“You wouldn’t just use pee, but you can clean it and make it into useful water, and that’s what we advocate,” Bruno Pigott, executive director of the WateReuse Association and former acting assistant administrator in water for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), told TechCrunch.
To be clear: you should not actually contribute gallons of your pee to help cool data centers, as Kelce facetiously suggests. But just for the sake of the thought experiment: what would happen if youdidtry to cool a data center with a steady stream of pee?
“Pee contains all sorts of stuff. It contains salts, it contains urea, bacteria, organic matter of all sorts that can leave mineral deposits. If you just put that into a cooling tower or something else, it would require constant cleaning,” said Pigott. “One of the methods of cooling is called evaporative cooling, where hot air is passed through water to remove heat through evaporation. Can you imagine if you just poured urine through hot air?”
We do have the technology to turn our urine into potable drinking water — that’swhat astronauts do in space, since they can only bring so much water with them on their spacecraft. But that isn’t efficient at a large scale, and even if it were, it’s not like scientists can just access millions of gallons of pee at will (well, not unless Kelce really commits to the bit). Instead, our toilet water ends up in wastewater and sewage.
That’s where water treatment facilities come in, providing recycled water to spare us from the smell of evaporated urine. These facilities use membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light, and other processes to treat water until it’s clean enough for industrial use. In some cases, this water can even be treated to the point that it’s drinkable.
“We use recycled water for cooling for all kinds of industries, and we have for decades,” Dr. Greta Zornes, practice leader for water reuse at the engineering firm CDM Smith, told TechCrunch. “So this is only one application, but definitely, there’s been a boom in recycled water for data center cooling.”
Though Zornes has worked on water reuse technology for more than two decades, her day-to-day work has shifted with the rising demand for data centers.