Jason Kelce’s pee joke turns AI data centers into a water fight

Jason Kelce’s pee joke turns AI data centers into a water fight
Jason Kelce’s latest pitch is deliberately ridiculous: drink up, collect your urine and mail it off to cool AI servers. Yet behind the stunt is a serious fight over whether the data-center boom is draining communities dry.

The campaign, released Tuesday by Garage Beer and Liquid Death, lands as opposition to data centers and AI has become an election-year issue. Kelce, the retired NFL star and Garage Beer co-owner, tells viewers that AI facilities “waste millions of gallons of water” before holding up a jar of yellow liquid and declaring: “We want your pee to cool these data centers.”

The joke escalates into a singalong urging people to “pee on computers together,” while fine print warns viewers not to actually ship urine anywhere. The brands say the provocation is meant to turn a crude gag into attention for water use. Liquid Death creative vice president Andy Pearson argued that resistance to AI data centers is one of the few issues that spans “the political and cultural spectrum,” while Garage Beer CEO Andy Sauer called water “the world’s most valuable resource.”

There is, however, a sliver of science beneath the toilet humor. Experts say untreated urine would foul cooling equipment with salts, urea and bacteria — but wastewater, including urine, can be cleaned and reused for industrial cooling. “You wouldn’t just use pee, but you can clean it and make it into useful water,” said Bruno Pigott of the WateReuse Association.

That solution is constrained by infrastructure. In Loudoun County, Virginia, data centers used roughly 200 million gallons of recycled water a day in 2025, but still drew an estimated 260 million gallons daily from potable supplies. Building treatment capacity takes money, time and a nearby wastewater system large enough to supply it.

Not everyone is buying the campaign’s righteous veneer. One commentary dismissed it as “an obvious stunt: don’t send your pee to strangers,” puncturing the ad’s environmental messaging along with its punchline. Still, the stunt captures a widening reality: AI’s water footprint is no longer a technical footnote. It is becoming a mainstream political and marketing target.

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