Jason Kelce’s invitation to mail urine to AI data centers is deliberately ridiculous. The water anxiety behind the gag is not: as data-center construction accelerates, the fight over who gets to use local water is becoming impossible for the industry to ignore.

The campaign, released Tuesday by Garage Beer and Liquid Death, puts the former NFL player in front of a jar of yellow liquid to declare that AI data centers “waste millions of gallons of water.” It then urges viewers to send their pee to a data center of their choosing—while fine print warns them not to actually do it.¹

The brands frame the stunt as both provocation and public-service messaging. Liquid Death creative vice president Andy Pearson said opposition to AI data centers is one issue that crosses political and cultural lines, while Garage Beer chief Andy Sauer called water “the world’s most valuable resource.”² The pitch lands amid protests and lawsuits over proposed facilities, with residents raising alarms about water use, power demand, utility costs and noise.²

But the commercial’s crude premise brushes against a workable, if far less glamorous, solution. Treated wastewater—including water that once contained urine—can be reused for industrial cooling, experts say. “You wouldn’t just use pee, but you can clean it and make it into useful water,” Bruno Pigott of the WateReuse Association said.³

That is not a simple escape hatch. In Loudoun County, Virginia, data centers used roughly 200 million gallons of recycled water daily in 2025, yet potable supplies still accounted for 260 million gallons, or 57% of their water use.³ Rural projects can face an even harder constraint: wastewater plants may not be large enough to supply and treat the required volumes.³

The joke has also drawn a more cynical reading. One critic called it an “obvious stunt” and noted the central instruction plainly: “don’t send your pee to strangers.”⁴ Still, the ad has achieved what its sponsors wanted—making an infrastructure problem vivid enough to become a punchline.