In a cheeky marketing campaign, Liquid Death teamed up with former Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce to share a solution to reduce the environmental impact of AI data centers, which require large amounts 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 teamed up. We want to cool these data centers with your pee.”
Then, a crowd of people walk through a field drinking their own branded beverage and singing in unison, “To save humanity, let’s pee on the computer together!”
That’s an interesting commercial. What’s even more interesting is that Kelce unwittingly discovered a real tactic for cooling data centers.
“The Liquid Death commercial is funny and tongue-in-cheek,” Michael Obradovich, Ecolab’s vice president of data center global accounts, told TechCrunch. “But in reality, a significant amount of alternative water sources are already being used to a similar extent to cool these data centers.”
Using these alternative water sources in data centers can at least partially offset the demand for potable water. One such alternative water source is recycled water, which is made by treating wastewater or sewage so that it can be safely reused. Wastewater and sewage contain many things. — Human urine.
“Rather than just using your urine, you can clean it and turn it into useful water. That’s what we’re advocating for,” Bruno Pigott, executive director of the WateReuse Association and former acting deputy administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), told TechCrunch.
To be clear, you shouldn’t actually be donating gallons of your own pee to cooling data centers, as Kelce jokingly suggests. But just for the sake of a thought experiment, what happens if you try to cool a data center by constantly flushing urine?
“Pee has all kinds of stuff in it. It’s got salts, it’s got urea, it’s got bacteria, it’s got all kinds of organic matter that can leave behind mineral deposits. If you just put it in a cooling tower or something, you’re going to have to clean it regularly,” Piggott says. “One method of cooling is called evaporative cooling, where you pass hot air through water and remove the heat through evaporation. Can you imagine if you just poured your urine through the hot air?”
We have the technology to turn urine into drinking water. That’s the astronaut’s job, since there’s only so much water an astronaut can bring on a spacecraft. But it’s not efficient at scale, and even if it were, scientists wouldn’t have unfettered access to millions of gallons of pee (well, unless Kelce gets serious about it). Instead, the water from our toilets ends up in drains and drains.
That’s where water treatment plants come in, providing recycled water to protect us from the smell of evaporated urine. These facilities use membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light, and other processes to treat water until it is pure enough for industrial use. In some cases, this water may be treated until it is drinkable.
“We use recycled water for cooling in all kinds of industries and have done so for decades,” Dr. Greta Zones, water reuse practice leader at engineering firm CDM Smith, told TechCrunch. “This is just one application, but there is definitely a boom in recycled water for data center cooling.”
Zorns has been working on water reuse technology for more than 20 years, but her day-to-day work has changed as demand for data centers has increased.
“Right now, every day I work on developing recycled water for data centers,” she said.
When data centers use more recycled water, it puts less strain on local drinking water supplies. But industry can only move toward recycling water if it has the right infrastructure in place to process millions of gallons of water each day.
“You need to be near a wastewater treatment facility large enough to have enough water to use,” Zones says. “So when data centers are located in rural areas, the wastewater treatment facilities are often not large enough and cannot treat enough water to be able to pump it, treat it, and use it.”
Loudoun County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC, is home to more than 250 data centers and plans to build at least 24 more. As of 2025, Loudoun’s data centers collectively use approximately 200 million gallons of recycled water each day, but these data centers’ water usage is extreme, representing only 43% of the area’s daily data center water usage. The remaining 260 million gallons, or 57% of daily data center water usage, comes from drinking water supplies, according to Loudoun Water.
“It takes time because there’s a lot of infrastructure that has to be built that usually doesn’t exist right now,” Zones said. “That’s one of the problems. It just takes time to get it done.”
Obradovic believes the AI industry could even devote resources to building this kind of infrastructure to scale water treatment. For example, Meta plans to invest at least $270 million in sewage infrastructure projects near its data centers (the company also loses about $4 billion a quarter on its Reality Labs division).
“That’s where data centers can really come in and become the anchor for water infrastructure,” Obradovic said. “There are many stories and examples of data centers providing funding and funding to some municipalities to address some of these very challenges as part of their community engagement.”
On the policy front, Piggott is sponsoring a bill that would provide a 30% tax credit to help industry expand recycled water infrastructure.
“We think this will significantly accelerate the pace at which data centers and other industries enter this space,” he said.
Despite the unintended science behind the Liquid Death 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, nearly 7 in 10 Americans oppose data centers in their communities, and AI products continue to face pushback from consumers who feel the technology is being forced into their lives.
“It’s good to see people care about water. Anything that increases water awareness, no matter how crude, can actually be beneficial,” Piggott said. “This gives us an opportunity to let the public know what we are doing today.”
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