The Infinite Well: How Innovation Keeps Water Flowing

Humans are not running out of fresh water.

Kyle O’Donnell — Aug 12, 2025

Summary: Fresh water isn’t a fixed natural resource we’re passively depleting—it’s something humans actively create through technology and markets. From desalination and wastewater recycling to precision agriculture and atmospheric water generation, innovation continually expands the supply of usable water. Water depletion is not a looming crisis. Demand drives the ingenuity that enables continued water abundance.

Critics warn that humanity is depleting Earth’s finite fresh water supplies through overuse and pollution, urging drastic conservation measures. But this narrative misunderstands what “fresh water” is. Rather than a fixed natural endowment, fresh water is largely a product of human innovation and engineering. As technology advances and economic incentives align, humans continue expanding usable water supplies—turning the ocean, wastewater, and even air into sources of clean, drinkable water.

Environmental alarmists have been issuing stark warnings—humanity is running out of fresh water—for years. “Only 3 percent of the world’s water is fresh water, and two-thirds of that is tucked away in frozen glaciers or otherwise unavailable for our use. . . . At the current consumption rate, this situation will only get worse. By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population may face water shortages,” declared the World Wildlife Fund. The United Nations warned that “the world may face a 40 per cent shortfall in water availability by 2030.”

Solutions from experts follow a familiar pattern, claiming that the only way to avert a crisis is to adopt radical social and behavioral changes, driven by moral proselytizing, government intervention, or both, to save the water supply. Environmentalists urge people to replace old toilets with low-flow models, avoid running faucets while brushing their teeth or washing dishes, and switch to eating less water-intensive foods. Meanwhile, activists pressure elected officials to impose usage restrictions, ban certain crops in arid regions, and regulate everything from swimming pools to car washes.

Fortunately the economics of water innovation reveals why the apparent scarcity tends to be self-correcting, without requiring us to adopt ascetic lifestyles or perform symbolic actions like picking up dropped ice cubes to water house plants or writing letters to elected officials. Rising prices, not moralizing pleas, lead people to conserve, look for substitutes, recycle resources, and innovate helping to meet demand through alternative means or improved efficiency.

Fresh Water Is a Product of Human Ingenuity

Scarcity is a fundamental feature of our world, but framing discussions about the realities of water scarcity as a matter of running out of fresh water is misleading and reveals an underlying conceptual error. Such a term conjures up images of humanity consuming Earth’s natural endowment of clean water until it’s gone. Fresh water is not a fixed stock nor is it simply out there in nature waiting to be discovered and used. It’s created through human effort.

There is nothing natural about turning on a tap in one’s home and having clean, fresh water flowing out on demand. The water flowing from your tap began its journey as rain, groundwater, or surface water, and it became “fresh” only after passing through treatment plants, filtration systems, and distribution networks. What we call fresh water is best understood as water that has been made usable for human purposes through innovations in technology and infrastructure.

If we had a magic wand to instantly transform seawater, agricultural runoff, or industrial wastewater into pure H₂O, the distinction between fresh and other water sources would dissolve. But, human ingenuity, enabled by markets and the price system, address water scarcity as well as any magic would.

As the price of water rises due to increases in demand or decreases in supply, market mechanisms kick in to encourage conservation and efficiency improvements while higher prices make previously uneconomical water sources profitable, thus spurring investment in new technologies and supply sources. Indeed, the full spectrum of solutions to water scarcity is far broader and more diverse than discussions about a monolithic global water crisis suggest. To see that, it helps to disentangle the major uses for fresh water.

Most fresh water withdrawals are for agricultural and industrial uses. According to the 2024 United Nations World Water Development Report, agriculture consumes roughly 70 percent of global fresh water withdrawals, industry accounts for 18 percent, and domestic use makes up the remaining 12 percent. These proportions vary significantly between countries, with larger shares for industry in higher-income countries and for agriculture in least-developed countries.

Agricultural Revolution: Precision and Efficiency

Agriculture’s major share of water use reflects market forces and technology driving remarkable efficiency gains. Israel, where “two thirds of the land is semi-arid or arid and much of the soil is of poor quality [and where] there is a shortage of natural water resources, a scarcity of precipitation” leads in agricultural innovation. Between 1986 and 2008, the country’s crop production increased by 40 percent while agricultural water use remained constant. How? Technologies such as drip irrigation, which apply water directly to plant roots and see 95 percent uptake by avoiding evaporation, are used to water 75 percent of Israel’s crops.

Elsewhere, technologies such as precision agriculture using GPS and sensors are used to enable farmers to apply water exactly where and when it is needed. For example, Valley Irrigation’s smart pivot systems adjust water application based on real-time soil moisture data. Controlled environment agriculture represents an even more dramatic leap in water conservation. AeroFarms’ vertical farming systems use 95 percent less water than field agriculture and produce yields 75 times higher per square foot. Plenty’s indoor farms recycle 99 percent of their water and produce crops year-round regardless of climate. As technology advances, genetic innovations can also reduce agricultural water needs, such as utilizing CRISPR gene editing to enable the development of crops that require less water while maintaining their nutritional value.

What’s Old Is (Made) New Again

Advanced wastewater recycling now produces water that exceeds WHO drinking water quality standards, with water-stressed countries such as Singapore meeting 40 percent of its water needs (and growing) through wastewater recycling. San Diego’s Pure Water program will produce half of the city’s water supply by 2035 from treated wastewater.

Advances in chemistry and materials science promise to make purifying water even cheaper. Graphene oxide membranes developed at the University of Manchester could make desalination far more energy-efficient, while biomimetic membranes inspired by plant cell structures promise breakthrough efficiencies in water filtration and desalination. Furthermore, electrochemical treatment can remove virtually any contaminant from water, enabling the reuse of previously unusable industrial wastewater.

Beyond treatment plants, innovative groundwater management pumps treated wastewater and excess surface water back into underground aquifers, creating massive underground reservoirs for drought protection. These managed aquifer recharge projects globally now store billions of gallons annually, turning natural storage systems into actively managed water banks.

Substituting Away from Fresh Water

Digging into industry’s 18 percent share of fresh water usage reveals that many functions currently performed by water, such as cooling, may not require water at all. Data centers, which consume 5–10 percent of the total US electricity supply, traditionally use massive amounts of water for cooling because it had been cheap and abundant.

Here we see a demonstration of market forces at work as rising resource costs incentivize innovation and substitution: Google has developed AI-powered cooling systems that reduce energy consumption by 40 percent, while Microsoft is testing underwater data centers that use seawater for cooling to achieve better efficiency than land-based facilities. Further, immersion cooling technology submerges servers in specialized fluids, eliminating water use entirely while improving the servers’ performance.

Meanwhile, thermoelectric power plants, which account for 34 percent of US freshwater withdrawals, increasingly use dry cooling systems and recycled wastewater. Palo Verde Nuclear Station, the largest generator of electricity in the United States, operates entirely on treated sewage water from nearby municipalities.

Turning Our Oceans and Air into Fresh Water Sources

Perhaps the paradigmatic example of humans creating fresh water from previously unusable sources is desalination. Desalination technology has transformed seawater into a primary fresh water source in some countries. Israel desalinates more than 55 percent of its domestic water supply—a figure expected to rise to 90 percent in the future. Similarly, Qatar desalinates 48 percent of its water needs. Modern reverse osmosis filtration technology has dramatically reduced desalination costs. As such, Israel’s newest plants, to give one example, produce water for less than $0.50 per cubic meter, which is competitive with many traditional sources of fresh water.

And what may be one of the most futuristic fresh water technologies already exists. Atmospheric water generation technology from companies such as Watergen can extract water directly from air humidity using solar power. Such systems are now operating in more than 65 countries and produce up to 5,000 liters daily, even in desert conditions. FountAir LTD’s AIR4WATER device combines air conditioning with water generation to simultaneously cool air and produce purified drinking water from condensation.

Building-integrated water systems capture rainwater and condensation for reuse. Skysource/Skywater Alliance has developed atmospheric water generators integrated into buildings that can supply significant portions of the occupants’ needs. Smart buildings increasingly include gray water recycling systems that reuse shower and sink water for irrigation and cooling.

Conclusion: The Innovation Pipeline and Global Markets Mitigate Future Risk

The Earth isn’t running out of water any more than it ran out of food after the English preacher Thomas Malthus made his dire predictions about the consequences of overpopulation more than two centuries ago. Water follows the same pattern as every other resource: human creativity applied to the challenges of scarcity drives innovation that creates new forms of abundance.

From ancient aqueducts to modern desalination plants and atmospheric water generators, humans have never accepted natural limitations on freshwater supplies. The same creativity that turned seawater into municipal water supplies and transformed sewage into drinking water continues expanding the definition of usable water. Global markets further reduce water stress by enabling regions to specialize by importing water-intensive goods from water-abundant areas rather than producing everything locally.

Rising demand creates rising incentives for innovation. As traditional sources become more expensive, market signals encourage both conservation and technological advancement, resulting in a continuously expanding water supply that grows to meet human needs and capabilities.

The lesson is clear: Water scarcity isn’t about planetary limits but about the pace of human innovation relative to demand growth. Given the remarkable technologies already emerging and the powerful economic incentives driving their development, the future promises water abundance through human ingenuity and market-driven innovation, not sacrifice and restriction.

Blog Post | Water Use

The AI Land and Water Panic Is Wrong

Bill Maher and Erin Brockovich think we are running out. We are not.

Marian L. Tupy — Aug 7, 2026

Summary: Concerns that AI data centers are exhausting America’s land and water are largely overstated. Data centers occupy relatively little land compared with agriculture and other established uses, while their water consumption reflects temporary displacement rather than permanent loss. New cooling technologies and alternative water sources are also reducing local demand, suggesting that engineering—not scarcity—will shape AI’s environmental impact.

The American consumer advocate Erin Brockovich went on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday night to talk about what she has spent the year mapping: American towns that found out a data center was coming only after the bulldozers arrived. She has collected thousands of such reports from all fifty states. A big facility, she says, can consume millions of gallons of water a day. The audience was meant to conclude that artificial intelligence is swallowing the country’s water and land.

Start with the land, because that part is easy to settle. Cushman and Wakefield, the commercial real estate firm that tracks these deals, reports that the average parcel bought for a data center in 2024 ran to a couple hundred acres. Scale that up by the computing capacity the industry expects to have running by 2030, and by my reckoning every data center in America, plus all the ground around the buildings, comes to roughly the area of Rhode Island. The buildings themselves would fit inside a mid-sized city.

Now compare that with how we already use land. The federal government requires refiners to blend corn ethanol into gasoline and growing that corn takes an area about the size of New York State, for a fuel that a 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found is probably dirtier than the gasoline it replaces. The Agriculture Department pays farmers to leave a Kentucky-sized area unplanted. Since 2000, American farmland has shrunk by an area larger than Colorado, and output went up anyway. None of this made the evening news.

Water is the harder argument, and it is where the case goes wrong at the level of chemistry. A data center does not destroy water. Cooling moves heat but does not burn anything. Hydrogen and oxygen do not come apart in a cooling tower. The water molecules leave as vapor, and hydrologists have long put their average stay in the atmosphere at about nine days before they fall again as rain. The word often used, “consumption,” does not mean the water is gone. It means the water left the neighborhood. That is a genuine cost to a neighborhood. It is not a subtraction from the world’s supply, and no amount of AI will make it one.

The problem of local water displacement is one that engineers have been fixing for two years. The scary numbers come from old evaporative towers, but the newer Nvidia chips run at 113 degrees Fahrenheit. That is hotter than the air outside on most summer days. Heat moves from hot to cold on its own, so the liquid sheds its warmth into the open air through a radiator, like the one in a car. Those radiators need fans, and fans need power, so the better chips turn a water problem into an electricity problem. That is a good trade, because building power is something this country knows how to do.

Similarly, Microsoft has announced designs that circle the same fluid through a sealed loop past the chip and back. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft already run some sites on treated city wastewater rather than anything anyone would drink.

Brockovich anticipated this answer. In an essay published two days before the broadcast, she argued that a sealed loop does not remove the water use but only moves it to the power plant that supplies the electricity. She is right that this second, hidden figure is bigger than the water used at the site itself. But the two together still amount to less than one percent of all the water Americans consume. The figures behind it come from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in a study Congress ordered and the Energy Department published. Its lead author, the staff scientist Arman Shehabi, supplies the numbers that both sides of this argument quote.

The comparison with national consumption is drawn by Robin Gaster of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, who reviewed the same evidence in July and drew two conclusions. The technology to bring on-site water use near zero already exists. And the upstream share depends on which power plants get built, which means it is not fixed either. A forecast of disaster must assume that nobody will ever build anything different.

For scale, the EPA’s WaterSense program reports that outdoor household water use runs to about nine billion gallons a day, most of it landscape irrigation: suburban sprinklers use more water in two days than all data centers in the country uses directly in a year.

The host pushed back against Brockovich’s more alarmist claims, but he soon went back to his old assumption that there are simply too many of us and that we are using too many resources. In an April 2019 monologue, Maher cheered the falling birth rate, called fewer humans the best gift we could give the planet, and named our numbers as the great unspoken cause of the climate crisis. Last Friday, he repeated those concerns. He was wrong to do so.

In 1980, the economist Julian Simon bet the biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, that a basket of metals would grow cheaper as the population grew. Ehrlich sent the check ten years later. The economist Gale Pooley and I are keeping the score. The Simon Abundance Index we published this April found that the Earth was 536 percent more resource-abundant in 2025 than in 1980, a period in which humanity added nearly four billion people. Every commodity we track is more plentiful per person than it was, because each additional person arrives with a mind as well as a mouth.

Maher has spent three decades treating every new demand on the earth as a bite out of a fixed inheritance. Data centers are only the latest one. The land is plentiful. The water is not leaving the planet, and the engineers cooling these AI machines are already several product cycles into solving the thing he is sure cannot be solved.

Yale Environment 360 | Water Use

After Decades of Drought, Water Is Rising in the African Sahel

Jul 31, 2026

“Near-extinct oryx are returning. Farms are prospering as irrigation water reaches fields for the first time in decades. Farmers are even nurturing new trees on their land. Once a byword for drought and famine, the African Sahel region on the southern flank of the Sahara Desert now has more water than it has for decades. Wells are filling as water tables have risen by 13 feet or more in places. Lake Chad, which was one of Africa’s largest expanses of water before shriveling during the droughts, is recovering.

Over years of drought in the late 20th century, the sun hard baked the soils of the Sahel. Now, erratic but extreme rains are returning to this semi-arid region, causing lethal floods but also replenishing rivers, filling desert depressions, restoring water to dried riverbeds known as wadis, and sluicing rainwater off impermeable soils directly into aquifers. The process began in the 1990s but has accelerated in the past five years…

But increased rainfall since the drought years of the 1970s and 1980s explains only some of the rewetting of the Sahel. It cannot fully account for the transformation, say researchers. Also driving the rewetting, they posit, are changes to the land surface, ranging from the internationally funded Great Green Wall project to the revival of traditional water harvesting methods and the chaos caused by jihadist militants, which has led to the abandonment of irrigation projects that once emptied rivers of their flows.

Much remains unclear in these remote lands on the edge of the Sahara Desert, but the trend seems set to be long-term, with climate scientists saying more — and more extreme — rainfall is on the way in the 21st century. As underground water reserves revive, some are forecasting an agricultural renaissance.”

From Yale Environment 360.

Amazon News | Water Use

Amazon Data Centers 7X More Water-Efficient than Average

Jun 12, 2026

“When data centers use water for cooling, one of the most important metrics is how efficiently they use that water—meaning how little water they use for each unit of compute. Amazon announced that its global data center operations used just 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) in 2025, a rate that’s over 7x more efficient than the industry average of 0.84 L/kWh.

In other words, we use far less water per unit of compute than others in the global data center industry, which as a whole accounts for less than 0.5% of all industrial water use globally.

And we’re continuing to get even more efficient year over year. These efficiency gains are the result of years of investment in custom cooling technology, smarter systems, and a commitment to minimize water use wherever possible.”

From Amazon News.

Bloomberg | Water Use

A Startup Pulls Water Out of the Air to Confront Shortages

May 15, 2026

“The large metallic white box sits in a Southern California parking lot, looking unremarkable until water starts flowing from a hose attached to it. Peer inside, though, and it’s nearly empty but for some wires, tubes and a container of light-colored material.

The water isn’t being conjured out of thin air by magic but by MOFs— metallic organic frameworks. MOFs are nanocrystalline structures engineered at an atomic level to attract specific molecules. In this case that’s H2O and the machine made by startup Atoco is silently harvesting molecules from the surrounding air and storing them in the material’s porous cavities that serve as microscopic water tanks.

Atoco founder Omar Yaghi shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry for pioneering MOFs and on an April morning he gave Bloomberg News an exclusive demonstration of the commercial prototype of its atmospheric water harvester in the lot outside the company’s Orange County laboratory…

Set to go into production later this year, the shipping container-sized machine will produce up to 4,000 liters (1,057 gallons) of water daily and can be installed at data centers, hospitals and other critical infrastructure. An off-the-grid model that operates on ambient sunlight and produces less water can be deployed to communities where water must now be trucked in.”

From Bloomberg.