Denver data center continuously waters its lawn even after city announced drought restrictions, enraging residents — it’s unclear if site is breaking the law or using its own recycled water

Denver Water, which supplies the city and its surrounding areas, has imposed Stage 1 drought restrictions in its service area starting August 2026 as water supplies continue to drop. According to Gadget Review, commercial properties like data centers can only water grass twice a week — on Tuesdays and Fridays — until September 30. Starting October 1, lawn sprinklers will be banned for use until the Board of Water Commissioners declares otherwise. However, one resident who was out walking their dog saw that the new AI data center built close to their home was watering its lawn and using so much water that some areas have started to puddle.

“We can’t water our lawns until next summer, at the earliest, but you better believe that they are watering their entire green with so many sprinklers that it’s already making a giant pond, but I can’t water my f****ng tomatoes. I hate it here,” one resident claimed in the video.

This has understandably raised a lot of outrage, especially with all the widespread, bipartisan resistance that these data centers have been facing. However, there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to the video. Firstly, we do not know when the video was shot; there’s a possibility that it was recorded on either a Tuesday or a Friday, meaning the site was well within its rights to water its lawns, at least until September 30.

The publication also noted several other possibilities: it could be using recycled, non-potable water, which Denver Water explicitly states, “are approved to irrigate any day of the week”; it could hold a variance from the utility provider, granting them permission to water their grass under “special circumstances,” or it was just plainly violating the law. Without further information, there’s just no way we can determine what is going on based on a single video. Nevertheless, this compounds the negative perception that data centers are already facing. Although closed-loop cooling technologies like those from Microsoft and Nvidia have essentially cut data center water consumption for cooling to zero, we still cannot get around the fact that several sites have already caused water issues for their neighbors.

Many people are raising issues about data centers’ massive resource consumption and the other negative effects like noise and air pollution that they could potentially bring to their surroundings. It’s for these reasons that Denver, and hundreds of other jurisdictions, have passed temporary bans and moratoriums on data center development.