Dehydrated flower

Recently, the Environment Agency (EA) warned that unless our water is “carefully managed, England will run out of this precious resource at the times we most need it.”

But our water demands are only rising, they add, partly due to population growth but also thanks to “the servicing of new technologies, such as the cooling of data centres powering AI.”

Speaking to The Guardian, an EA source revealed that the AI boom means the body cannot accurately predict future water consumption, making it hard to plan for the future (per the publication, data centres don’t have to report how much water they use to cool servers).

DataCentreReview.com shared that the water needed to keep data centres cool is as much as 360,000L in large centres. A study suggests AI-specific water demands could reach 6.6 billion cubic metres by 2027, “which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of 4-6 Denmark or half of the United Kingdom.”

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