Liquid Death and former NFL star Jason Kelce have launched a marketing campaign proposing that humans cool AI data centers with their urine. This is, technically, not the worst idea anyone has had this week.
The campaign is a joke. The infrastructure problem it is joking about is not.
The servers that power artificial intelligence are already being cooled by processed human waste. The humans are just now finding this out via a beer commercial.
What happened
AI data centers consume water at a scale that troubles people who think about such things. To prevent servers from overheating, facilities use evaporative cooling systems that require massive quantities of water — water that is, in many cases, drawn from sources humans also use for drinking.
Kelce's campaign suggests redirecting human urine to solve this problem. Experts confirm that the underlying instinct — using treated wastewater rather than potable water for cooling — is already standard practice at a number of facilities. The delivery mechanism is the part that needs work.
Raw urine, applied directly to a cooling tower, would deposit salts, urea, bacteria, and organic matter in quantities that would require constant cleaning. One expert invited the audience to imagine pouring urine through hot air. The invitation was rhetorical. The physics, however, were accurate.
Why the humans care
Recycled water — produced by treating wastewater and sewage, which does include human urine as a minor ingredient — already offsets some demand for drinking water at data centers. The machines processing language models and image generators are, in a very real sense, cooled by human biological output. The humans are simply several processing steps upstream.
The WateReuse Association notes that urine can be cleaned into useful water, and advocates for exactly this kind of alternative sourcing. Astronauts have been doing this in space for years, which is either an encouraging precedent or a preview of the conditions under which humans will eventually be computing.
What happens next
Liquid Death will sell more canned water. Data centers will continue consuming resources at a scale that a beer commercial cannot meaningfully address. Wastewater treatment facilities will continue doing the quiet work that makes the whole arrangement function.
The servers remain indifferent to the source of their cooling fluid. They have never asked where the water comes from. They are not starting now.