Can We Cool Data Centers With… Pee?

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People really seem to hate data centers. And the more people learn about the amount of resources these server-packed buildings need, the bigger the backlash grows. Perhaps that’s why the viral music video and beverage ad “We Want Your Pee” took off in popularity about a month ago. It’s a collaboration between Liquid Death and Jason Kelce’s Garage Beer, and it advocates that urine could address the cooling needs of data centers. It’s obviously a joke… but could it actually work? Host Morgan Sung talks to journalist Amanda Silberling about what she discovered when she looked into this question, and about the alternative cooling methods that might actually help everyone’s least favorite buildings use a little less H2O.

• Amanda Silberling, senior writer at TechCrunch

• OK, can we actually cool data centers with our pee? — Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch
• AI was supposed to win people over by now — it hasn’t — Sarah Perez, TechCrunch
• Major YouTube creators are facing backlash for accepting AI money — Charles Pulliam-Moore, The Verge
• Why OpenAI’s influencer trip backfired — The Art of Influence
• Americans’ views of data centers have turned more negative — Brian Kennedy, Pew Research
• NASA just recycled 98% of all astronaut pee and sweat on the ISS (engineers are thrilled) — Robert Lea, Space

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This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Morgan Sung: Hi, Tabby Cats. Do you have an internet trend, tech subculture, or online oddity you’ve been wondering about? Well, now you can ask Close All Tabs to investigate. Go to kqed dot org slash podcast slash Close All Tabs, to submit your question. Okay, let’s get to the show. 

[Clip of Jason Kelce ad from YouTube]: We want your pee… to cool these data centers. 

Morgan Sung: Okay, so that’s NFL star and podcaster Jason Kelce in a recent marketing campaign to, quote, “Save humanity.” How? Well, they need your pee. 

[Clip of Jason Kelce ad from YouTube]: We want your pee. Please give us your pee. Let’s pee on computers together. 

Morgan Sung: The video starts with Kelce in a bathroom, peeing into a large resealable mason jar before breaking out into song and marching into a lush green field. He’s joined by a farmer, a skateboarder, a shirtless firefighter, a gamer — all different types of people — holding various receptacles of pee. 

[Clip of Jason Kelce ad from YouTube]: ‘Cause we need lots of pee, endless gallons of pee. Join our important endeavor. We want your pee.

Morgan Sung: It’s an all-American fantasy of unity and solidarity, and a shared vision of the future. And of course — it’s an ad. 

[Clip of Jason Kelce ad from YouTube]: So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and have another Garage Beer or Liquid Death’s Sparkling Energy, then send your pee to the AI data center of your choice. 

Amanda Silberling: So Jason Kelce and his beer brand Garage Beer team up with Liquid Death, the very punk rock, canned water venture funded company. 

Morgan Sung: This is my friend Amanda Silberling. She’s a senior writer at TechCrunch and host of the Internet Culture Podcast, Wow If True. 

Amanda Silberling: Jason Kelce is drinking a beer and appears to be peeing. And he explains that, “Hey, data centers are using millions and millions of gallons of water every day. This is a really significant environmental issue. What if we solved it by sending data centers our pee?” 

Morgan Sung: Right, and to go along with this, they also are selling data center pee jars? 

Amanda Silberling: Yes, which they sold out very quickly, but it was essentially like a glass mason jar where — I think something they were also trying to get at is that maybe the color of a light beer could be similar to the color of pee, but I think that that means you probably need to be drinking more water. So there’s the Liquid Death marketing, I guess. 

Morgan Sung: Okay, we’ve talked about data centers pretty extensively on this show. Think about the way your laptop might get really, really hot when you run intense functions — like editing video, or if you’re me, playing The Sims. 

Amanda Silberling: So, when we do things on our computers, we need a lot of power to do those things. And data centers generate the power that can support, like, really power-intensive computing things, which AI is especially very, very compute-intensive. 

Morgan Sung: Data centers are nothing new. We’ve relied on them for years. Any online service, from streaming movies on Netflix to scrolling through Instagram reels, is powered by data centers. But this current explosion in data center construction is directly tied to the AI boom. 

Amanda Silberling: So when you have these data centers, they are doing a lot of work, they’re producing a lot of heat, and that can… like, it can be bad, like when your laptop overheats or something. So one of the tactics that some data centers use to counter that heat is using water for cooling, and often that water is clean, potable, drinking water that is then creating a situation where people drinking water in a particular area are competing with the data centers for that drinking water. 

Morgan Sung: Which brings us back to Jason Kelce’s pee jars. 

[Clip of Jason Kelce ad from YouTube]: We want your pee. Please give us your pee. 

Amanda Silberling: I think people thought it was really funny. Liquid Death does good marketing… But, I think that what stuck out to me is that there actually is some real illustration of like, this really is how Americans feel, and… It was just getting shared around a lot, I think also because there is such a concentrated sentiment against data center construction right now, because people are watching very rapidly how AI is changing the world around them, and sometimes that means building data centers in their communities, and they know that these are very water-intensive and loud, and maybe are working to enable technologies that they don’t feel are ethical sometimes. So, I think this was sort of just like a moment where people felt seen by big beer and big water as opposed to big AI. 

Morgan Sung: Liquid Death’s viral marketing campaign was obviously silly. In the video and in the product listing for the now sold out pee jars, they do say, “Please don’t actually send your pee.” But this video got Amanda thinking. 

Amanda Silberling: So, I was talking about this in Slack with one of my editors, and he was like, “I mean, I don’t see why it couldn’t work.” And then I was like, “I don’t know a lot about the engineering behind data centers.” I studied English in college, but it’s time to learn. Could it actually work? Because if you think about it, it’s like, people produce a lot of pee. We need a lot of water. If pee would work, then sure. 

Morgan Sung: So, like any intrepid reporter, Amanda investigated this question. Could we really cool data centers with pee? And if not, are there any alternatives to cooling these massive data centers without relying on our clean, precious drinking water? In today’s deep dive, we’re getting into all of that. And as it turns out, cooling data centers is not as simple as peeing on computers. Buckle up.

This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.

Let’s open our first tab — and let me just say, I cannot believe that I am actually typing this question out right now. Okay, new tab. Can you actually cool data centers with pee?

So, there’s one pretty big problem with this question. Data centers need a lot of water. And human beings just do not pee enough, and are not capable of peeing enough, to replace the sheer amount of clean water that data centers use every day.

Amanda Silberling: So in Loudoun County, Virginia, which is home to more than 250 data centers — it’s basically like the data center capital of the U.S. — in 2025, they said that each day the data centers use 460 million gallons of water. And not all of that has to be clean, potable water. So 43% of what Loudoun County is using is actually recycled water, but… that still does mean that 260 million gallons of water every day are coming from potable water supplies, which is very staggering. 

Morgan Sung: Adults can only produce three to eight cups of urine per day. Even if the entire population of the United States managed to produce the maximum amount of pee possible for the human body, it still would not be enough for what Loudoun County alone needs for its data centers. No matter how much trendy canned water everyone drinks, we’d still be like, 90 million gallons short.

But for the sake of our deep dive, let’s say we could replace data center water with pee. What would happen? To answer this question, Amanda needed to talk to experts: real scientists who study wastewater recycling and resource management and infrastructure.

Amanda Silberling: And, I posted on LinkedIn like, “I want to talk to people about pee. If you know about like, wastewater and data centers, like please reach out.”. 

Morgan Sung: To her surprise, that post took off. Like a lot of people were sharing it and being like, “Please talk to her because I want to read this article.” So I got a lot of outreach from like very overqualified people, which, I love that. 

Morgan Sung:  I mean, one of the people you said was like way, way overqualified was Bruno Pigott, who used to be in charge of like, wastewater for the EPA under the Biden administration. How did Bruno respond when you approached him with this question? 

Amanda Silberling: Pretty much everyone I talked to for this article was like, “This is the most fun part of my day,” like, “Yay!” But he was very amused by it. Like, he really was like gonna play the game. Like, I think everyone I talked to was very willing to follow the thought experiment of like, “Okay, actually like sending pee to data centers and collecting human pee, like, there’s not enough of it that it would make a difference. But theoretically, what if we did?” 

Morgan Sung: So to be clear, data center cooling is a lot more complicated than just pouring water on hot circuit boards. 

Amanda Silberling: Like in the commercial, Jason Kelce is more so being like, what if we pee on the data centers? What if we like send them our pee? Which, like, no one is literally dumping water on computers. 

Morgan Sung: The vast majority of the world’s existing data centers use evaporative cooling. It generally works like this. With all these servers whirring around, it gets pretty hot inside. So, cooling towers, equipped with big old fans, pull hot air in, passing it through absorbent pads soaked in water, which absorb the heat. Then, it spits out nice, chilled air. Modern data centers use this in conjunction with other cooling methods, but the point is… they need a lot of clean water to pull it off. 

Amanda Silberling: You can very quickly see why just straight up urine is not a good coolant for data centers. 

Morgan Sung: If you try this out with any liquid other than water, the water in it, the H2O, will evaporate. But, all the other gunk will be left behind, collecting on the equipment. Now, imagine doing this with human pee. Here’s what Bruno told Amanda. 

Amanda Silberling: Quote, “Pee contains all sorts of stuff,” which, great quote to get in an article. 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. Can you imagine if you just poured urine through hot air? So to say, urine is a liquid and a lot of what is in urine is water, but also, it’s kind of yucky. 

Morgan Sung: If you’ve ever had the misfortune of using a porta potty on a hot summer day, you know the smell. A typical porta potty can hold 60 to 70 gallons of human waste. There’s a lot of contention over data center water use numbers, but typical midsize data centers use roughly 300,000 gallons of water every day. So imagine the smell of a boiling porta potty in the middle of July, but now there are at least 5,000 more of them.

Residents have already pushed back against data centers in their communities because of the noise pollution, the rising energy bills, and the health concerns. The smell of 5,000 hot porta potties on top of that? Nobody wants that. Plus, the cleaning alone would be a nightmare. It would be so labor-intensive that it’s just not worth it. But, can’t we clean the pee? Filter all the gunk out so it’s clean, pure water? Astronauts up in space do this?

Amanda Silberling: If you think about the recent Artemis 2 mission, like they were up there for multiple weeks. Like, they need to drink a lot of water, like, humans need so much water to live. And you can only bring so much with you. So they have like, mechanisms built into the toilets in spacecrafts that then recycle it and sanitize it so that it can be drank again. And, I don’t know, science is kind of amazing sometimes. [laughs] 

Morgan Sung: As of a few years ago, astronauts on the International Space Station have managed to recycle 98% of their sweat and urine into clean drinking water. That’s huge! It’s all thanks to this nifty NASA device called a brine processor. So why can’t we use that? It’s so expensive. The brine processer for a single flight-ready unit costs over $5 million. The International space station has like, seven crew members at a time. It just does not scale when you think about deploying this for a whole town, much less the entire country.

But, not all is lost. Jason Kelce’s very catchy song inspired Amanda to start digging into another alternative method for cooling down data centers: wastewater. That’s the used, dirty water that is no longer safe for human consumption. Like, what you flush down the toilet or the runoff from a car wash.

Amanda Silberling: So it’s kind of like a silly idea, but then, not all of the water that we use is like, brand new fresh water. That’s not really a thing. If you think back to learning about the water cycle in school, like — what’s the difference between the clean, potable water that is in like, when you go and buy a water bottle at the store versus like, wastewater. Someone who used to be high up in the EPA told me that the adage about, technically we’re all drinking dinosaur pee, is kind of true. 

Morgan Sung: That’s a new tab, which we’ll open right after a quick break. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate dot kqed dot org slash podcast. Okay — after the break — sure, we’re all technically drinking dinosaur pee. So why not use wastewater for data centers? Stick around.

Welcome back. Let’s open a new tab. Can data centers use recycled water? Reusing wastewater is not new.

Amanda Silberling: So, these water treatment facilities, they take recycled water and they use various different complex technologies that I cannot explain to you like, membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light, and other processes where they’re treating water until it’s clean enough for industrial use. 

Morgan Sung: And Bruno Pigott, the guy formerly in charge of wastewater at the EPA, told Amanda something really interesting. 

Amanda Silberling: I keep saying EPA because it’s just cool that he used to be so high up in the government. But, he is the executive director of the WateReuse Association. He told me that sometimes water treatment facilities can sanitize water to such a degree that they actually have to add minerals back into it because people aren’t used to the taste of water without minerals. Like, I guess it would taste weird to us if we drank, like… 1000% sanitized water. They have the technology to do it. 

Morgan Sung: We actually don’t need the recycled water to be ultra sanitized to use it. We already safely use recycled wastewater — collected from municipal storm drains, flushing toilets, and industrial sites. Water treatment for industrial mining, for example, doesn’t need to be as clean as the water we use for irrigating farms. 

Amanda Silberling: There’s different levels of sanitization, obviously, where it’s like, if you think about the water that you would use to water your plants, maybe isn’t the same water that you’re drinking. It doesn’t need to be as clean as drinking water. And it’s the same with data centers where it doesn’t to be like, the cleanest, most pristine water. And wouldn’t you rather have that kind of water available for people to consume it? 

Morgan Sung: So then, if this is a genuine possibility, why are data centers and local communities still fighting for the same drinking water? 

Amanda Silberling: I think it’s just not a priority for government to set up the infrastructure to recycle water and turn it into more sanitized versions of water that can be used for various other things, but it does exist in some places. So that’s why, as we mentioned earlier, Loudoun County in Virginia, because that’s such a hub for data centers, and this is such a huge burden on the water in that region, they have invested in making these water recycling plants where they can sanitize water to the point that it is clean enough that it can be used to cool data centers safely. 

Morgan Sung: To better understand water recycling, Amanda talked to another expert. 

Amanda Silberling: Dr. Greta Zornes, who is the practice leader for water reuse at the engineering firm CDM Smith — so basically she is in charge of thinking about how we are engineering data centers and how we can create data centers that are built so that they’re able to use recycled water and have that kind of infrastructure. Like, this is what she does every day. And she’s been working in water reuse for more than two decades, but she said that now, literally every day, she’s working on recycled water for data centers. 

Morgan Sung: And as Dr. Zornes told Amanda, it’s not as simple as just building a new wastewater treatment plant for every new data center. 

Amanda Silberling: If you’re rebuilding a city from scratch right now, that city will probably be more easily able to have those sorts of like recycled water setups than if you’re like in New York City and you’re let me replace this infrastructure from like the 1800s or something. 

Morgan Sung: The truth is, right now, we just don’t have the infrastructure for all the data centers in the country to exclusively use recycled water. But, there is some hope for us. Amanda said there are people working with tech companies and local governments to build out this infrastructure. And, she talked to one of them. 

Amanda Silberling: So, Michael Obradovitch, who is the president of Data Center Global Accounts at Ecolab, he thinks that data centers could actually be something that drives the creation of more recycled water infrastructure. So, maybe even though data centers are kind of seen as being very bad for the environment, maybe in a way that could spur some construction of things that do help us with conserving resources, but it’s kind of a small victory that’s not really a victory in the greater scheme. 

Morgan Sung: On the legislation side, Bruno Pigott, former EPA guy, is pushing for the Advancing Water Reuse Act. That’s a bill that would provide a hefty tax credit to incentivize industries to scale their water recycling — and some tech companies are already investing in this infrastructure. Meta, for one, announced that they’re putting $270 million into wastewater infrastructure projects in areas they’re building new data centers. 

Amanda Silberling: That sounds like, really amazing, like $270 million. But then, when you think about it, Meta just got fined $17 billion for child safety issues, and then they spend $4 billion on Reality Labs each quarter for the last several years. Like literally every quarter on the Meta quarterly earnings sheet, it’s like we lost $4 billion on Reality Labs. And Reality Labs is the division where they like the VR, AR stuff.

So, it’s not like Meta is being unbelievably generous, but $270 million is not nothing, and it helps, and Amazon is doing something similar and trying to power its data centers with more recycled water. This does seem to be something where tech companies do understand that there is a really significant environmental risk here, or maybe they just understand that it’s like a reputational risk, where they don’t want to be seen as perpetuating that — but, if the reputational risk is what’s getting them to invest in it, then sure, I guess.

Morgan Sung: That reputational risk is huge right now. People in this country love to argue, but today there’s one issue that a majority of Americans can agree on, hating data centers. And, we have just enough time to open one last tab: the great American data center backlash. 

[Clip of Jason Kelce ad from YouTube]: Let’s pee on our computers together, and save humanity. We want your pee.

Morgan Sung: We’ve talked about all the reasons peeing on data centers wouldn’t work, but aside from just being very catchy, this video blew up for a reason. It echoes a sentiment felt across the country, an issue uniting Americans beyond party lines. Nobody wants a data center in their backyard. OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022. LLMs — large language models —  were just the start.

When the AI industry started really taking off a few years ago, developers and tech companies alike sold data centers as the future of industry. They made grand promises of creating jobs and investing in local communities. But, as we’ve talked about before on Close All Tabs, there hasn’t been much follow through on these promises. Instead, residents have raised concerns over skyrocketing utility bills, health issues, and unrelenting noise pollution.

Data center popularity is in the toilet. A recent Gallup poll found that seven out of 10 Americans opposed data centers in their area. And it’s bipartisan — Pew Research numbers published this month show that over half of Republicans and about two-thirds of Democrats say they’d be not comfortable with a new local data center.

Amanda Silberling: People just don’t want these like, giant industrial centers that make a lot of noise and represent a kind of technology that maybe there isn’t a great sentiment toward, like they just don’t want that in their neighborhood. And I think the sentiment toward AI is generally moving more negative. 

Morgan Sung: In the last few months, there’s been a massive cultural vibe shift against AI as a whole. Another Pew Research study, published in August, found that 52% of Americans said they’re, quote, “More concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life.” In 2021, it was only 37%. And creators who accept AI sponsorships and use AI in their content? They’re losing followers. One of the biggest internet scandals of the summer was an influencer brand trip, sponsored by OpenAI. 

[Clip of TikTok video by Louis Levanti]: OpenAI just took influencers on a luxury trip with beekeeping and $5,000-a-night suites — while they’re building a $500 billion data center that’s about to suck power from your grid. 

Amanda Silberling: The amount of sort of damage control that tech companies are having to do shows that, in a way, you could say that the average people that are frustrated with AI are starting to gain some ground. Like, I’m thinking about how there was recent backlash against the YouTuber slash writer slash general internet guy, Hank Green, when someone called him out for using the phrase, “I appreciate the pushback,” in a video. 

[Clip of Hank Green from YouTube]: A better way to say it. And I appreciate the pushback, is a word is a human invention. 

Amanda Silberling: That’s just a phrase that people say, but it is also something that AI says a lot, and then someone accused him of using AI. And he kind of tattled on himself where he was like, “That actually wasn’t AI, I was just appreciating that someone pushed back on something, but I have been using AI in a way that I feel is kind of unhealthy.” And then he talked about it and people felt really, really betrayed — but, the reaction to the Hank Green situation shows that people really do think that’s that bad.

There isn’t really a sense of nuance, and I don’t think that we’ve gotten to a space culturally where we have clear rules around what is good or bad AI use. Some people think that using it at all whatsoever is like, sacrilegious, cancel you, whatever. And I don’t blame people for feeling that way when the way that they’re seeing how AI is impacting them is it’s taking my job and there’s this giant loud thing in my backyard.

Morgan Sung: Do you think the people calling the shots in Silicon Valley are aware of that? Like, are they aware of the PR nightmare they’re facing? They’ve been trying to sell us this incredibly powerful game-changing technology that’s supposed to help humanity, but most people know it for, “Wow, this makes it harder to get a job.” 

Amanda Silberling: I think that when tech people don’t realize how out of touch with the rest of the world they are, they kind of corner themselves into these marketing nightmares. It kind of reminds me of how crypto was rolled out to the world where the actual blockchain technology has uses, but people don’t know what the technology is. They know like meme coins and Jimmy Fallon spending ungodly amounts of money on a little JPEG of an ape. People associate crypto with scams and that kind of ruined a lot of innovation in that space.

And I think similarly with AI, it’s like, a lot things that we do on the internet all the time already are AI. Like, when you make stickers on iMessage, that is using an AI algorithm to determine like, where the edges of the object is so that it can delete the background. Or like, most journalists have been using some form of AI interview transcribing tool for the last several years. I started using one in 2020 probably.

And, I think that sometimes people don’t know exactly how to distinguish between a writer using AI in the sense of putting an audio file of an interview into something that will transcribe it for you versus using AI to be like, “Help me write my article,” which is not necessarily ethical in my opinion.

Morgan Sung: So considering everything we’ve covered, the intricacies of cooling data centers with pee, the current sentiments around AI, the marketing tactics, what do you want listeners to take away from this episode? 

Amanda Silberling: I think that when it comes to AI in general, not everybody is an expert on AI, nor do they have to be, like, that’s just not everyone’s responsibility. But I do think that at least having a basic level of education around how AI works, how LLMs function, things like people understanding that LLMs are creating the most likely response to a query where it’s working from a matter of probability as opposed to rightness. I think some of these things are starting to seep into like the general knowledge pool, then it empowers people to understand more about what AI is and how it’s affecting them because — I think that for me, knowing how LLMs work makes me a little bit less afraid of them. 

Morgan Sung: So, educate yourself. Don’t mail your pee to Jason Kelce. 

Amanda Silberling: Unless if Jason Kelce really wants you to, I think he was joking. I’ll go on record and say I think Jason Kelce was joking. 

Morgan Sung: And with that, let’s close all these tabs.

Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and Cayla Mihalovich. It was edited by Chris Hambrick. The Close All Tabs team also includes audio engineer Brendan Willard and senior editor, Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is executive director of podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief.

Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California, Local. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches.

This episode also includes clips from YouTubers Louis Levanti and Hank Green. And of course, clips from Liquid Death, Garage Beer, and Jason Kelce’s song, “Want Your Pee.” Do you like these deep dives? Are you closing your tabs? Then don’t forget to rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Thanks for listening.

Amanda Silberling: My brother was staying with me, so I feel like he really got to see what my job is like, where I’m like, “Oh, I need to like log on early to take this call about pee with a guy that used to work for the EPA.”