Things That Took MoreWater Than Building This Site

How we got one bucket

This site was made in one long conversation with an AI coding assistant: a first draft, then a few rounds of redesign. Nobody can meter that exactly, so we started from a careful published estimate and leaned hard toward the thirsty side.

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather logged his own AI coding sessions for eight weeks. He estimated that a median session uses about 0.6 kWh of electricity, with a range of 0.25 to 1.2 kWh. We allowed 2 kWh, well above the top of his range, to cover the draft and every redesign.

Each kWh uses water twice. The data center evaporates some to stay cool: Google's own measurement works out to about 1 liter per kWh, and the US average is lower. The power plant evaporates more: about 3 liters per kWh on the average US grid, the figure used in the "Making AI Less Thirsty" paper. We rounded the total up to 5 liters per kWh.

2 kWh × 5 liters per kWh = 10 liters, one bucket (2.6 gallons).
A low-end estimate, 0.25 kWh × 1 liter per kWh, is about a cup.

Not counted: water used to train the AI model, to make its chips, to build the data center, or to run the screen you're reading on. The footprints for jeans, phones and burgers do count their whole supply chains, so keep that in mind when comparing.

Tap water and footprints

Some pages count water straight from the tap: flushes, showers, sprinklers. Others count a water footprint, every liter it took to grow and make something, including rain that fell on the fields. Rain on a wheat field isn't taken from anyone's river, so the two kinds aren't perfectly comparable. Each page's small print says which kind it is.

The answer doesn't change if you only count tap water. One old-style toilet flush beats the whole website, and a five-minute shower beats it more than four times over.

One question to an AI

Google measured a median text prompt to its Gemini apps in May 2025 at 0.24 Wh and 0.26 mL of water, about five drops. That counts the data center, not the power plant. Adding about 3 liters per kWh for the power plant gives roughly 0.7 mL more, so about 1 mL in all, or twenty drops. Long or complicated requests use more, and other companies' models differ.

2,400 liters ÷ 1 mL = 2.4 million questions. At one a minute, that's about 4.6 years.

Every number in the book

Sources

1. Zeke Hausfather, The real energy use of agentic AI, Skeptical Science (2026).
2. Simon P. Couch, Electricity use of AI coding agents (2026).
3. Google's measurement of a median Gemini text prompt (August 2025), as reported by The New Stack.
4. Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, Mohammad A. Islam, Shaolei Ren, Making AI Less "Thirsty" (2023).
5. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report.
6. GCSAA, Golf courses reduce water usage by 31 percent (survey of 2024 water use). Facility count from the National Golf Foundation: about 14,000 US golf facilities at the end of 2024.
7. Arjen Y. Hoekstra, The water footprint of food (2010), and the Water Footprint Network: bread, apple, coffee, egg, chocolate, beef.
8. WWF, The impact of a cotton T-shirt.
9. UN Environment Programme, Putting the brakes on fast fashion.
10. Friends of the Earth and Trucost smartphone estimate (2015), via the Water Footprint Calculator.
11. US EPA WaterSense: toilets, faucets, showerheads and outdoor watering.