Can we actually cool data centers with our pee?

A cheeky Liquid Death campaign accidentally stumbles onto a real data center water strategy

Published: 2026-08-22
Category: Quick Take
Sources: TechCrunch

The campaign

In a cheeky marketing campaign, Liquid Death teamed up with former Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce to offer a solution to AI data centers' environmental impact — they require massive quantities of water to prevent servers from overheating. "AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water," Kelce quips in the video, before the crowd sings "Let's pee on computers together to save humanity!"

It's funny. What's funnier is that Kelce has unwittingly stumbled onto a real tactic.

The reality

"The Liquid Death commercial is funny and tongue-in-cheek, but in reality there is a fair amount of alternative water sources already being used to a similar extent to cool these data centers," Michael Obradovitch, VP of Data Center Global Accounts at Ecolab, told TechCrunch. These alternative sources partially offset demand for potable drinking water. Chief among them is recycled water, made by treating wastewater and sewage so it's safe to reuse. And wastewater contains — you guessed it — human urine.

"You wouldn't just use pee, but you can clean it and make it into useful water, and that's what we advocate," said Bruno Pigott of the WateReuse Association.

The thought experiment

You should not actually contribute gallons of your pee to cool data centers. But as a thought experiment: what would happen if you tried? "Pee contains salts, urea, bacteria, organic matter that can leave mineral deposits. If you just put it into a cooling tower, it would require constant cleaning," Pigott said. Evaporative cooling passes hot air through water to remove heat; pour untreated urine through hot air and you'd get a mineral-clogged, biofilm-coated mess. The takeaway is that the chemistry matters — treated, recycled water is a legitimate tool, raw sewage is not.

The take

The serious point hiding inside the joke is that AI's water footprint is becoming a first-order problem, and data center operators are quietly adopting treated, non-potable water sources to relieve pressure on drinking supplies. That's a genuinely important sustainability shift — even if a beer company made it funny first.

Source: TechCrunch, "OK, can we actually cool data centers with our pee?," Amanda Silberling, August 20, 2026.