Being willing to advertise your energy drink and lite beer with the suggestion that customers might want to piss it out into a bottle and send the results to their local AI data center is perhaps indicative of the plunging public sentiment around the AI industry. That’s the latest stunt pulled by Liquid Death, the $1.5 billion canned water company, which teamed up with Garage Beer and one of its investors, NFL player and Super Bowl winner Jason Kelce (who is now Taylor Swift’s brother-in-law), for a new ad campaign titled “We want your pee.”
It’s quite the thing. It begins with Kelce pissing into a mason jar over a toilet, while explaining to the camera that AI data centers waste millions of gallons of water. The solution? “We want your pee, to cool these data centers.” And so begins a 90-second spot in which Kelce, a Liquid Death mascot, and many more sing a song about how they want your pee. As the crowd gathers, more and more people join in, carrying their containers of piss, and even collecting additional pee from passing eagles, with one of their number taking a swig of his own output, which happens to be the same color as Garage Beer. Like I said, quite the thing.
Liquid Death has found astonishing success since its 2019 launch, using all manner of attention-seeking marketing campaigns. That’s included launching a tea-flavored can called Dead Billionaire (renamed after its original name, Armless Palmer, resulted in a lawsuit from the Arizona Beverage Company), releasing a death metal album with lyrics sourced from hate mail the company had received, and an in-universe sponsorship for the dystopian Running Man game show in the recent movie remake. This latest campaign accompanies the company’s inevitable launch of energy drinks under the same brand.
Garage Beer, meanwhile, is an independent lite beer company, whose largest investors are Travis and Jason Kelce, and is reportedly the fastest-growing lite lager in the U.S., now being sold in Red Robin restaurants.
Data centers are claiming to have made improvements in efficiency when it comes to water usage of late, although it seems like some of this is PR fluff in an attempt to push back against the public’s growing understanding of just how awful it is. It was recently reported in the UK that there just isn’t enough water at all to match the government’s plans for data centers, while Reuters reports that in 2025, data centers used 4.5 trillion liters of water globally. Never mind that they also burn monstrous amounts of electricity, are causing the global component shortages that are driving up the cost of tech, and inflate a financial bubble that will soon be destroying an economy near you, all in the name of creating obsequious predictive text engines.
So yeah, send ’em your piss. Liquid Death is even selling an $18 lidded glass container in which you can send it, although it’s currently sold out.
Yes, this is all an ad campaign, and it’s naturally a deeply hypocritical one. Liquid Death was merrily selling NFTs in 2022 (a good year after they were done!), despite the similar environmental issues surrounding crypto bullshit. But what’s important here is how much it indicates what the companies involved think will appeal to their audiences. Using a recognizable face to cheerfully suggest it’s normal to hate data centers so much that you’d want to piss on them is demonstrative of shifting public perception regarding the trillion-dollar genAI grift.