Big Tech is draining American communities dry — literally.
Two beer brands just turned that into a punchline, and the country is laughing.
But what Liquid Death and Garage Beer are mocking is a genuine corporate power grab that working families are paying for in their utility bills.
The Campaign That Has Everyone Talking
Liquid Death and Garage Beer launched a campaign called “We Want Your Pee,” pitching human urine as an alternative to the millions of gallons of water that AI data centers typically use for cooling.
The campaign launched with a “P[EE].S.A.-style” ad starring Garage Beer co-owner and former NFL player Jason Kelce, opening with Kelce at his toilet, where he reveals he is collecting his urine in a bottle.
“AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water,” Kelce says to the camera.
He then walks into a wooded meadow and begins singing, “We want your pee, please give us your pee,” joined by Murder Man, Liquid Death’s mascot, who is also holding a jar of urine. A crowd gathers, each person carrying a container of their own, singing, “Let’s pee on computers, together, to save humanity.” The group eventually arrives at a post office to mail their contributions to the nearest data center.
The two companies also launched a limited edition resealable glass mug called a “data center coolant collector,” which is already sold out.
Garage Beer CEO Andy Sauer said the campaign’s humor doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the underlying issue. “Water is the world’s most valuable resource, and data centers are a hot topic, so we got together to have some fun, while raising a little awareness,” Sauer told Adweek.
Garage Beer is currently one of the fastest-growing beer brands in the United States, even as alcohol consumption among US adults has fallen to a record low of 54 percent.
The ad is funny. The problem it’s pointing at is not.
The Real Numbers Behind the Punchline
Big Tech companies have been racing to plant massive data centers across the country, and the communities hosting them are left holding the bill for the water and electricity those facilities devour.
According to the Washington Post, large data centers can use up to five million gallons of water a day, equivalent to the daily water needs of 10,000 to 50,000 people.
A single modern AI data center can use as much power as 100,000 homes, and many of the larger ones now being built are expected to consume up to 20 times that amount.
Two-thirds of all data centers built or in development since 2022 are located in water-stressed areas like southern Arizona, the Colorado River Basin, and Texas. These aren’t just abstract environmental statistics. They are a direct threat to the people who live and farm in those communities.
In parts of the PJM power market, a federal watchdog has warned that data center demand is already helping drive sharp increases in electricity prices.
For residents already struggling with inflation, rising grocery bills, higher insurance costs, and expensive utilities, the optics are politically explosive. Communities are being asked to conserve water and absorb higher living costs while some of the world’s most valuable technology companies secure the power and water needed to fuel the AI boom.
And who are these companies? The same ones that spent years throttling, demonetizing, and banning conservative voices on COVID policy, the 2020 election, and January 6. The Silicon Valley giants now demanding that rural counties sacrifice their water tables and electricity budgets are the very corporations that decided ordinary Americans couldn’t be trusted to have a political opinion.
A Gallup poll finds 71% of Americans oppose building AI data centers in their local communities, with nearly half strongly opposed. Environmental concerns — especially water and electricity consumption — were the top reasons cited by opponents.
Public opposition to data centers now appears stronger than resistance to other major infrastructure projects. Gallup noted that 53% of Americans oppose having a nuclear power plant in their area — significantly lower than opposition to AI data centers.
That’s a remarkable number. More Americans would rather have a nuclear plant next door than a server farm. That tells you something about how this country actually feels about what Big Tech is doing to their communities — whatever the press releases say about “innovation” and “economic development.”
The AI Machine Behind the Water Bills
The data centers aren’t being built for the fun of it. They are the physical foundation for the AI expansion that companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into. And the employment picture that expansion is building toward is not a pretty one.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes the AI tools that Anthropic and other companies are racing to build could eliminate half of entry-level, white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to as much as 20% in the next one to five years, he told Axios.
That warning didn’t come from a critic of the industry. It came from the man running one of the leading AI labs in the world. He is building the technology he is warning about. When the people profiting from the machine tell workers to brace for impact, it deserves to be taken seriously.
Tech entry-level hiring dropped 30 to 50% in 2025, Wall Street banks are cutting approximately 200,000 roles concentrated in entry-level analyst positions, and nearly 55,000 US layoffs in 2025 were directly attributed to AI.
So the picture is this: Big Tech plants a data center in a red county, drives up the electricity bill for every family and small business in the area, drains the local water supply, delivers a handful of permanent jobs, and then uses the computational power it built to automate away the white-collar careers those communities’ kids were counting on.
That’s not progress. That’s a shakedown dressed up in a press release about the future.
The Liquid Death and Garage Beer campaign is a stunt, and a clever one. Liquid Death vice president of creative Andy Pearson noted that the data center issue “is literally the one thing that unites all Americans right now, across the spectrum.” And he’s right — the Gallup numbers bear that out. This isn’t a left-right issue. It’s a community-versus-corporation issue, and the corporations have been winning for years.
Jason Kelce singing about urine in a meadow is funny. The part where your electric bill goes up, your well runs low, and your kid’s job gets automated out of existence — that part isn’t.
The same Big Tech companies that built the censorship infrastructure to silence conservatives are now asking rural America to subsidize their server farms. The answer to that request should be a lot shorter and a lot blunter than a mason jar full of anything.
Sources: Breitbart News; AdWeek; Gallup Poll, March 2-18, 2026; Washington Post (data center water figures); Axios (Dario Amodei interview, May 2025); PJM federal watchdog report on electricity prices; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory data center energy report.
