For years, the story of constrained development has been about power: interconnection queues, grid capacity, and multi-year waits to get a project energized. That story hasn't gone away — but a second constraint is now catching up fast, and it's one most developers haven't had to plan around before: water.
The problem is bigger, and closer, than it looks
Data centers are the clearest example. U.S. data-center water demand is projected to climb to roughly 380 billion gallons a year by 2030, up from an estimated 6 billion gallons today, with significant development occurring in some of the country's most water-stressed regions. Today, about 40% of existing U.S. data centers are already located in areas experiencing high or extreme water stress.
At the same time, communities are scrutinizing data-center development more broadly. Data-center moratorium efforts in the U.S. jumped from 8 to 78 in the twelve months between May 2025 and May 2026, with 69 currently in force and four permanent bans on the books. Roughly $130 billion in U.S. data-center projects were blocked or delayed by local opposition in Q1 2026 alone.
These actions aren't driven by water use alone—power demand, land use, noise, and other community concerns also play a role—but water availability is increasingly part of the conversation.
Regulators are moving too. New York has paused hyperscale data-center permitting statewide, Minnesota has created a dedicated water permit specifically for data centers, and water-use disclosure requirements are spreading across state legislatures this year.
For developers, that means securing sufficient water; and demonstrating how a project will affect local water resources, could become an increasingly important part of where and how projects move forward.
(Figures above reflect Aquaria's own analysis, drawing on Data Center Watch's Q1 2026 report, a 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study, and MultiState's 2026 legislative tracker.)
An interesting parallel to what we do
We were recently introduced to a company tackling this problem head-on: Aquaria, which builds containerized, factory-built units that condense water directly out of ambient air on-site — no aquifer draw, no municipal water main, and none of the multi-year "will-serve" permitting process that typically gates a project's water supply. A single 40-foot unit can produce up to 20,000 liters (about 5,300 gallons) a day; arrayed at scale, roughly 50 units on about an acre can supply up to 250,000 gallons a day for a 100 MW campus — deployed in weeks rather than years.
The parallel to vertical solar didn't take long to notice. When grid interconnection couldn't keep pace with demand, the industry's answer was on-site generation — batteries, generators, and increasingly your own array on the pad.
Aquaria is making the same move for water: instead of waiting on infrastructure that wasn't built for how fast projects now need to move, you generate the resource on-site instead.It's the same underlying logic behind what we build at Sunzaun.
Vertical solar lets a site produce power without displacing the land beneath it — energy and agriculture sharing the same footprint, on a timeline that doesn't depend on someone else's queue.
Aquaria is applying that same principle to water. Neither of us is claiming to solve every constraint on a site. But both are examples of a broader shift: as legacy infrastructure struggles to keep pace with demand, the winning approach is increasingly to bring the resource to the site, rather than wait for the site to be connected to it.
Why this matters for how we think about energy sites
Put the two pieces next to each other and a pattern emerges. A campus needs both power and water to get built. On-site solar can help supply the power. On-site atmospheric water generation can help supply the water. Neither fully replaces the grid or the utility on its own — but stack them on the same site, and you start to get campuses that are meaningfully more self-sufficient on day one, not just faster to permit on one axis.
That's the real shift worth watching: the next generation of project development may increasingly be about making sites more self-sufficient, not just finding available land and securing a grid connection.
Power and water are simply the two constraints hitting first. We don't have a water offering today, and this isn't an announcement of one — but it's exactly why we're paying attention to companies solving the water side of that equation the same way we're solving the power side.
Sources: Aquaria, "Aquaria Hydrogrid" (August 2026); Data Center Watch Q1 2026 report; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2024); MultiState 2026 legislative tracker.