Former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce has appeared in a new advertisement criticizing the amount of water used by artificial intelligence data centers and offering an unusual solution.
The campaign, released Tuesday by Garage Beer and Liquid Death, shows Kelce apparently urinating into a jar as he tells viewers: “AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water. That’s why Liquid Death and Garage Beer have decided to team up. We want your pee … to cool these data centers.”
Kelce then performs a song asking for “endless gallons of pee” and encouraging the public to send urine to an AI data center.
Another scene depicts a crowd taking jars of urine to a post office, with a disclaimer saying, “The suits want us to tell you to please don’t actually send your pee.”
The advertisement promotes Garage Beer—which Kelce co-owns with his brother, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce— and Liquid Death’s sparkling energy drinks.
The Kelces joined Garage Beer in June 2024 as its largest investors and became owners and operators involved in marketing, sales, distribution and national expansion.
Garage Beer said the brothers spent two years preparing to join the company, whose recipe originated in Cincinnati, where both played college football for the Bearcats.
Though satirical, the advert draws attention to growing concerns about the amount of water some data centers require to keep computing equipment cool.
How AI Data Centers Use Water
Data centers house servers that generate large amounts of heat while processing and storing information. Some facilities use water-cooled chillers and cooling towers to remove that heat, with part of the water lost through evaporation. The amount required varies substantially according to a facility’s size, cooling technology, climate and workload.
A study backed by the Department of Energy estimated that U.S. data centers directly consumed 66 billion liters—about 17.4 billion gallons—of water in 2023, up from 21.2 billion liters in 2014. Hyperscale and colocation facilities accounted for 84 percent of the 2023 total.
The water footprint of AI data centers extends beyond cooling performed at the facilities themselves. Power plants can also consume water while generating the electricity used by data centers. Researchers estimated that this indirect consumption reached almost 800 billion liters in 2023, although the figure differed by region and the mix of energy sources supplying the grid.
The Government Accountability Office has said it is difficult to separate the energy and water consumed by generative AI from that used for other AI systems and conventional computing, in part because companies disclose limited facility-level data.
Not every data center uses the same amount of water. Facilities can reduce consumption through dry cooling, liquid-cooling systems, recycled water and the use of outside air during favorable weather. Those approaches can involve trade-offs, however, including greater electricity demand or reduced cooling efficiency under some conditions.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Matthew Robinson and Shakeema Edwards.
