We’re all now in a battle for drinking water with H20-guzzling data centres – and we’re losing
An investigation by Foxglove has revealed that the biggest water company in Britain doesn’t know how much water it supplies to data centres across the UK – or even how many it supplies in total.
As we’ve written before, data centres require huge amounts of energy to run – but also guzzle down huge amounts of clean drinking water, even while parts of the country are facing shortages.
We were shocked to learn that Thames Water doesn’t know how much water it supplies to data centres, nor even how many exactly sit within its supply grid. You can read the full story on the BBC.
The government needs to explain how it plans to build many more new water-guzzling data centres while stopping the taps running dry for homes and business. Click the button below to join us and write a letter to the minister in charge, Angela Rayner MP:
We understand from the BBC’s report that Thames Water has already been speaking to the government about the challenge of both supplying the tens-of-billions-of-pounds worth of new data centres the prime minister wants to build, while still keeping the taps running for homes and businesses.
And they’re right to be concerned. Research from Foxglove’s investigator suggests that a newly built hyperscale data centre would consume, on average, between 1.5-2 million litres of water per day. This estimate is based on the self-reported water use of existing hyperscale data centres operated by Meta and Google in Ireland.
What do data centre companies say they’re doing to improve the situation? Well, one of the bosses at Digital Realty, which runs 300 data centres around the world, boasted to the BBC about a new AI tool that could “conserve nearly 4m litres of water per year”.
Based on our investigator’s research, that should save us about two days’ worth of water consumed by a single hyperscale data centre. Not too reassuring then for the other 363.
To put all of this into terrifying perspective, the government’s own analysis says that by 2050, we’re looking at a shortfall of nearly five billion litres of water every day, with what we have, compared to what we need for everyone to have enough to drink and live as we do now. That’s around two million wheelie bins full of water extra needed, every single day, on top of what we use right now.
The question we need to be asking is: how are we going to find another five billion litres of water every day to have enough to drink, at the same time as building new hyperscale data centres which each consume millions of litres per day? And how can we even begin to think of a solution to that problem, when the existing water suppliers for data centres can’t even say for sure how much water they actually use right now?
One thing is clear: we are now in a battle for water – and we’re losing. On one side, there are families and businesses that need water to drink every day. Against us, there are the Big Tech companies pushing up many, many more of these water guzzling monsters all over the country, while we face down the ticking timebomb of our taps running dry by 2050.
This is what Foxglove is grappling with. We will continue to investigate and research further, including into what options we may have to bring challenges in the courts to make sure that the needs of British households and businesses for our drinking water always come first – not H20-guzzling AI.
This is a huge area of concern for us, and we’re going to keep pushing. We’ll keep you updated when we have more. To stay up to date, hit the button below: