It's a fair concern, and the track record and the global trends are the reason.
Eleveight AI's first AI Factory, in Gagarin, Armenia, is cooled with zero water. No water in the chips, No water in our cooling towers, No water drawn from Lake Sevan, from any Armenian river, or from any municipal drinking-water supply. We built it this way on purpose, and this is not a feature we added later. It is the foundational engineering principle the entire facility was designed around, from its very first day.
The numbers hold it up. Our Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) is effectively 0 L/kWh. Our Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is 1.1, placing the facility among the most efficient AI data centers in the world. Across current and every future phases, water will never be part of our cooling system. This is a clear and unchanging commitment, which is locked into every engineering and expansion decision we make.
The wider conversation about data centers and water
Globally, data center water consumption is a legitimate and growing public concern.
Roughly 75 to 90% of large data centers worldwide use water-based cooling as their primary heat removal method. Approximately 57% of the water data centers use directly comes from drinking-water sources.
This is the global reality of how most digital infrastructure is cooled today. Eleveight AI has taken a fundamentally different approach.
What "water" really means in cooling: the distinction most people miss
There is a critical distinction that gets lost in the public conversation: not all "liquid" in a data center is water, and not all "water" in a data center is the same thing. Some systems use municipal drinking water that ends up evaporated into the atmosphere. Others use a synthetic, engineered fluid that never touches a tap, never evaporates, and never enters a natural waterway. These are completely different categories with completely different environmental implications, and confusing them is exactly what fuels public anxiety.
Every data center "uses water" in some sense, but “what kind of water” is the real question. Here is how to tell: