Recently an alarming piece of news began circulating on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and various Substack authors: i Meta data centerMark Zuckerberg’s technology giant, would have completely dried up the Rio Grande in New Mexico. The accusations pointed the finger at the complex Los Lunasaccused of consuming so much water that it emptied the entire stream. Let us tell you why these accusations are actually without solid foundations.
Where does the water from Zuckerberg’s data centers come from and the hydrological crisis of the Rio Grande
The data center of Los Lunas does not draw water from the Rio Grande. It is supplied from municipal water network of the village of the same name, powered by four deep underground wells. An agreement signed in March 2025 between municipality of Los Lunas And Greater Kudu LLC – the company affiliated with Meta for the project – certifies it in black and white. The permits authorize withdrawal exclusively from the underground aquifer, andNew Mexico State Engineer’s Office confirmed that Meta does not have any rights to draw on the river.
Consumption data exist and are public: in 2023 the Los Lunas data center took approx 75 million gallons of water (about 284 million liters), dropped to 67 million gallons in 2024. It is precisely the 2023 data that has been torn out of context and transformed into alarming news fed to social media.
So why is the Rio Grande drying up? The answer is to be found in ongoing climate crisis. The Federal Bureau of Reclamation el’New Mexico State Engineer’s Office are clear: the river is experiencing an unprecedented hydrological crisiscaused by climatic factors. 2026 brought record spring temperatures, the earliest snowmelt on record and some of the thinnest mountain snowpack in decades. The New Mexico depends on snow at high altitude as a nature reserve for spring and summer: when it is missing, the rivers empty. Most of the water basins finds himself below 15% of capacity.
It should be noted, however, that this is apartial and localized drying in specific stretches of the rivernot the entire waterway, as the viral posts claimed. Treat close to Albuquerque and in the area of San Acacia they began to discover themselves already at the end of March, the earliest date in the last thirty years. In official reports, the Meta data center is not mentioned even once among the causes.
The real problem: Meta’s data centers and water consumption
That said, the issue of data center water consumption deserves attention. These facilities house thousands of servers that continuously generate heat and require constant cooling to be fully operational. Many plants use evaporation towers, where heat is dissipated by turning water into steam. Added to this is an indirect water footprint: a 2021 study on npj Clean Water and a 2024 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory show that data centers they consume water not just to cool downbut also indirectly in the processes of generation of the electricity that powers them. On a national scale we are talking about approx 66 billion litres Of direct consumption and almost 800 billion Of indirect impact and all this taking the sun as a reference 2023.
The Menlo Park company has declared its goal of achieving a positive water balance by 2030thus committing to returning more water to the environment than it takes away. In the Rio Grande basin it has already financed seven environmental regeneration projects, which in 2024 have returned 136 million gallons of water to the systemwith the aim of overcoming the 149 million per year when fully operational.
A question that remains open about the Los Lunas complex
However, there is one aspect that the checks conducted so far have not yet resolved: whether the intensive pumping of the underground aquifer by the Los Lunas water system – which also includes data center consumption – may or may not have indirect hydrological effects on the Rio Grande. This is a complex technical issue, on which local and federal authorities have not yet provided a definitive answer.
One thing is certain: the Rio Grande is suffering, and a lot, but the main cause, according to the authorities, is the drought and not Zuckerberg’s servers. However, the debate on the impact of large data centers on the world’s water-fragile regions remains open and absolutely necessary.
