WUNC, in reporting carried by VPM on May 14, put two numbers next to each other that the cooling industry should sit with. Meta's 30 megawatt data center in Forest City used about 4.2 million gallons of water across all of 2024. A proposed 300 megawatt facility in Apex is slated to use up to 1 million gallons per day, with roughly a third of that evaporating and never returning to the Cape Fear River.
One million gallons a day is north of 300 million gallons a year. That is not the Forest City number scaled by ten for ten times the power. It is a different regime, and the difference is the cooling architecture, not just the megawatts.
The reporting is precise about the part that matters: a third evaporates and does not come back. Withdrawal that returns to the watershed is a permitting conversation. Consumptive loss through an evaporative cooling tower is a subtraction from the basin. A 300 MW site evaporating a third of a million gallons a day is removing water from the Cape Fear system every day it runs at load. This is the water and power tradeoff arriving in a Southeastern watershed that, unlike the arid West, assumed water was the abundant input.
WUNC also raises cooling-process PFAS. The Cape Fear is one of the most PFAS-burdened river systems in the country before a single additional gram of cooling-related fluorochemical enters it. Any two-phase or fluorochemical-based cooling deployed in this watershed lands on top of a contamination baseline that is already in litigation and regulation. The PFAS exposure in two-phase and immersion cooling is not a hypothetical liability here. It is a marginal addition to a river that regulators are already trying to clean up, which makes the permitting risk for fluid-based architectures materially higher in North Carolina than in a watershed with no prior PFAS history.
The structural problem in the reporting is capacity, not malice. Rural water systems often lack the resources to commission the engineering studies that would tell them what a 300 MW cooling load does to pressure, supply margin, and drought resilience. They approve the connection before they can model the consequence. That gap is where the national water-crisis framing turns into specific local failures, and it is where the cooling vendor has an opening. A vendor that arrives with a credible water-per-megawatt model and a closed-loop or hybrid option gives a small utility something it cannot produce on its own.
The takeaway for operators planning North Carolina capacity is that the water question now precedes the power question in the Southeast, the same way it already does in Arizona. A 300 MW build on an evaporative plant in the Cape Fear basin is a permitting and reputational exposure that a water-lean architecture removes at the design stage. The cheapest time to solve this is before the rezoning hearing, not after the offsite and onsite water totals show up in a local newspaper.