A June 2026 report from the Bank of America Institute argues that AI-driven data center growth is straining water, power and materials in ways most site selection spreadsheets do not yet capture, and the numbers it attaches to that claim are worth a procurement team's attention.
Start with water, where the report's headline finding reframes the usual debate. Up to 75 percent of a data center's total water use happens off-site, according to the analysis by Taylor Bowley and Vanessa Cook, largely through electricity generation rather than on-campus cooling. Operators fielding community questions about cooling towers are, on this accounting, discussing the smaller share of the draw. BofA Global Research puts the aggregate effect in millions of liters per day indirectly tied to routine AI use.
Power is the second strain, and the report is specific about where it bites. Electricity demand from GPU-based servers is growing at roughly 30 percent per year, increasingly driven by inference rather than training. The institute writes that "the challenge is no longer total energy supply but the ability to deliver firm, continuous power at the right location." For buyers, that reads as a siting problem, not a generation problem: regions with nominal surplus capacity can still fail a deployment that needs firm megawatts on a specific substation.
Materials are the least discussed line item. Each incremental megawatt of data center capacity embeds roughly 60 to 75 tons of metals, particularly copper, according to BofA Global Research. At that intensity, simple multiplication puts a 100 megawatt campus at 6,000 to 7,500 tons of embedded metals before a single server arrives, which ties facility budgets to commodity markets in a way colocation contracts rarely price explicitly.
What the summary does not provide is methodology: how the off-site water share was allocated, which generation mix underlies it, and whether the copper figure counts grid-side reinforcement or only the campus. The institute points to a fuller analysis for that detail, and buyers should read it before repeating the numbers in a board deck.
The report lands amid visible siting friction. Municipal moratoria and water-use disputes have followed hyperscale projects across several US markets, and a bank research arm quantifying the off-site footprint gives both sides of those disputes new material.
For infrastructure buyers, the practical takeaway is that due diligence now runs upstream of the fence line: water accounting that includes the generating plant, interconnection that specifies firmness and location, and build budgets hedged against copper. Vendors who can document those three exposures will have an easier conversation with the next planning commission than vendors who cannot.
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