Fears as datacentres ‘fail to disclose water usage’

In January ministers announced dedicated growth zones to fast-track the construction of the powerful new datacentres required to power AI. There is now growing pressure for the centres to disclose the amount of water they are using.

England faces a shortfall of 5bn litres a day between available supplies and expected demand by 2055, according to Environment Agency (EA) figures. Thames Water has warned that some of the world’s biggest datacentres can consume up to 19m litres of water a day – the equivalent of supplying 50,000 homes.

A new generation of powerful datacentres will provide the infrastructure required for AI, housing the chips that can perform billions of calculations a second to answer online queries. These chips generate significant heat and require cooling with copious amounts of cold water or air.

Two of the largest datacentre providers, Equinix and Virtus, have already been granted licences to abstract water from ground supplies, according to environmental permits obtained by campaign group Foxglove under freedom of information rules.

Equinix was granted a licence for a datacentre in Slough, Berkshire, to extract up to 72,000 litres of water an hour – or 1.7m litres a day – from ground supplies.

Donald Campbell, director of advocacy at Foxglove, said: “It’s alarming that the Environment Agency has been handing out licences for datacentres to extract hundreds of millions of litres of water from the environment – while failing to keep track of the total.”

The EU has already introduced requirements for datacentres to disclose water usage, with the UK government facing calls for similar measures.

EA officials said water abstraction licences were granted only where the use of water is sustainable. They added that water consumption occurs in two main ways: indirectly through water used in electricity generation, which accounts for about 75% of the total, and directly for cooling computer components.

The EA said: “We are working with the technology sector to understand their water needs and develop sustainable solutions, allowing important infrastructure, such as datacentres, to be supported.”

Photograph by Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty Images