- Utah lawmakers advance a bill requiring annual water-use reports.
- Facilities could face ten thousand dollars per day in fines for noncompliance.
- State will publish water-use totals without identifying individual companies.
- Conservation groups support the proposal during its first legislative review.
- Bill responds to growing concern over water demands from data centers.
Monday, November 24, 2025 — Utah legislators are moving forward with a proposal that would require data centers to report their yearly water use to the state. The bill, sponsored by Representative Jill Koford of Ogden, would impose fines of ten thousand dollars per day on centers that do not disclose their water consumption. Supporters say the measure would give officials in the Division of Water Rights a clearer picture of how much water these large facilities divert, consume, and discharge.
While the state would release water-use numbers publicly, it would remove company identifiers to protect business information. Koford noted that water demands vary significantly among centers, pointing to the National Security Agency facility in Bluffdale and a low-water-use operation in West Jordan as examples. Conservation advocates backed the proposal, and no opposition was reported during the initial committee hearing. Lawmakers say the effort reflects growing attention to the substantial cooling needs of data centers, which can use millions of gallons of water per day, and parallels similar legislative discussions in several other states.
The following report is republished from the Utah News Dispatch
under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Thirsty data centers would have to report water use under Utah bill
by Annie Knox, Utah News Dispatch
November 21, 2025
Utah’s data centers would have to report to the state how much water they’re using every year under a proposal advancing at the state Legislature.
The vast centers housing rows of servers would have to pay up if they don’t disclose water use, said Rep. Jill Koford, R-Ogden. The bill she’s sponsoring would fine them $10,000 for every day they’re out of compliance.
“We’re very serious about protecting Utah water and making sure that we’re using it wisely,” Koford said.
A legislative water development panel agreed, voting unanimously Thursday to send the proposal to the full House for consideration. State lawmakers convene for the 2026 legislative session in January.
More data centers are cropping up in Utah and around the country to power artificial intelligence and other digital services. The construction is drawing attention to the massive amounts of water it can take to cool servers, with some using up to 5 million gallons of water in a day — more than 12,000 times the average use for a household of four.
Koford said the National Security Agency’s data center in Bluffdale uses more than 23 million gallons a year, while Novva, a low-water-use data center in West Jordan, uses about 85,000.
If the Utah bill passes, officials in the Division of Water Rights will get to see which data centers use the most water, but the public won’t. When it posts the numbers online, the state will remove identifying information to try to protect the companies’ intellectual property, Koford said.
But she has questions, she added: “What are you diverting? What are you consuming? What are you discharging? So that we can get a handle on it and plan for the future.”
The bill has support from the Great Basin Water Network, a conservation group. No one spoke up to oppose it Thursday.
Koford said the proposal won’t cap how much water the centers can use. Whether the state would impose limits in the future is “a reasonable question to ask,” she said.
To date, the main source of information on data centers’ water use comes from cities’ permitting processes, Koford said, “but our state engineer and our state water division has been left out of that conversation.”
Similar bills have surfaced in at least six states, including Oregon, Indiana and Georgia, according to the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators.
Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com.
