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A major river supplying water to seven U.S. states and Mexico via reservoirs like Lake Mead and Lake Powell, strained by overallocation and drought.
No evidence-backed relationships are recorded.
Lake Powell's surface read 3,517.24 feet on September 10, the lowest on record, after the Upper Colorado Basin's 2025-2026 snowpack came in thin and record warmth took more of it before the melt reached the river.
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The collaborative opens with $20 million of Amazon's money and $80 million still to raise. Amazon's sustainability report gives data center water use as liters per kilowatt-hour, plus one global total for 2025.
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Science News puts one town's 87 percent water cut beside a national heat record, and the case for treating that cut as the new baseline rests on a Southwest megadrought that has already run for decades.
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Kearny, Arizona, draws from the Gila River, and its own river commissioner made this cut. The federal Colorado River reductions that dominate Southwest water policy do not govern what the town of 2,000 receives.
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Arizona is about to lose more than a quarter of its Colorado River draw while TSMC and Intel build fabs that need millions of gallons a day. The reported pressure so far is on price and on who pays to replace the water.
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The reservoir is a quarter full, and the 1922 compact still allocates more water than the Colorado yields, so the new federal 10-year plan hands 3.7 billion cubic meters of annual cuts to three states and spares four.
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Interior's 2027-2028 guidelines cut Lower Basin deliveries by about a fifth and exempt four states. The 3-million-acre-foot option still on the table is roughly half of what the Lower Basin takes.
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Mead and Powell set multiple record lows this month, and the reliable wet signal lands where the water is used rather than where the snowpack that refills them piles up.
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Two former utility research heads argue water scarcity is now an energy-security problem. For anyone siting a plant or a data center, that moves water out of the ESG appendix and into diligence.
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