Improving "water efficiency" of data centres is a red herring
By Sameer Shah
with contributions from Nicole Wilson & Cassandra Workman
Billions of dollars are being invested to build new data centres in the USA as well as other countries. They are facing growing opposition from local communities, concerned, among other things, by their potential impacts on local water supplies. How should we understand and evaluate the complex issues, water amongst them, that data centres generate?
Last week, I began lecturing to a wonderful group of nearly 50 students in my course, "Society & Sustainable Environments." This is an introduction to sustainability thinking. Much like prior years, we spend the first few weeks differentiating between reductionism and holism—and the appropriateness of when to use these different scientific and philosophical approaches.
The difference between the two is central to our recent Water Alternatives article, "Water Efficiency Gains Won't Resolve Datacentres' Contested Future". In it, we argue that the development of data centres that are more water efficient may not quell the growing public opposition to their construction.
On what basis do we make this argument and, more importantly, why does it even matter?
Data centres are home to the IT hardware that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and modern computational applications require. Many critiques have been launched at the uptick in data centre construction. A major one is their ecological "footprint." This includes their water footprint—captured both in the amount of water consumed (i.e., not returned to its original source) for "direct" purposes, i.e., infrastructure cooling, and "indirect" purposes, including the water consumed in generating the electricity required for powering said data centres.
Scientists that estimate the volumes of water consumed across the AI supply chain and for operating data centres are making important public contributions. These studies are uncovering the scale of resource consumption, potential trade-offs between power and water use related to data centres' cooling practices, and possible means of reducing water use, including through more efficient cooling technologies. We refer to such contributions as "assessment-driven" research.
The problem with assessment-driven research is not what it is—but what it encourages, absent of wider, critical contributions that interrogate how, and for whom water should be used. Assessments can inadvertently create an information ecosystem in which water overuse is framed as a core resource management problem to be fixed with more efficient water-use technology. Fixes, such as "closed loop" cooling systems, are now part and parcel of passionate public defences of water use from corporate actors, such as Microsoft and OpenAI. For example, in June at Microsoft Build 2026, Microsoft's CEO went as far as to indicate that "the daily water usage [for state-of-the-art data centres] over the course of an entire year is roughly equivalent to what a single restaurant would use."
Putting aside how such claims can mislead the public about the water consumed across operational and supply chains, they can be a starting point for understanding why a reductionist focus on water consumed at a single site can mean little in the context of growing public outcries.
Reductionism, as a philosophy, nudges us to focus on the individual elements that comprise our systems: when we understand how those individual parts work, we can understand how the whole works. Deriving broader meaning about data centres, such as how they may be received by the public, by looking inwardly at their characteristics, such as the volumes of water used and the kinds of cooling technologies employed, can yield erroneous conclusions. One example of such a conclusion is, if we can reduce water use, we might expect a corresponding decrease in opposition.
But should we expect this? We suggest, on the contrary, that water efficiency gains could act as a license for expediting buildout and diminishing the concerns local communities have about data centres and AI. Water represents far more than a stock to be managed. It often serves as an entry point into communities, for better or worse. Debates over whether water should be used for certain ends often stands in for the larger kinds of change that local communities seek to prevent in the first place. Even more, we now see opposition uniting beyond local borders. The public is voicing immense concern about the potential wealth inequalities that AI can further, public health implications, such as social isolation and cognitive dependence, and increasingly, cybersecurity and cyberterrorism risks. If communities—and the public at large—are concerned about a broader set of cultural, economic, and relational changes vis-à-vis data centre development, why should we expect "water efficient" installations to reduce opposition, even marginally?
In returning to where we started, I want to communicate the same message I do to my students. Data centres, and the interests they advance, are taking hold in complicated settings that involve people, nature, cultures, histories, and economic interests. Instead of assuming an AI future is inevitable, many communities are doing the exact opposite—mobilizing, organizing, and challenging the very infrastructures that AI depends on. This should signal to us that a more holistic orientation is needed, one that considers the many different perspectives and interests around our collective future. Paying attention to these kinds of connections and relationships is what holism implies. Instead of looking inward at specific qualities of data centres, holism encourages us to look outwards, examining the relationships and risks that manifest when water is used as an input to further data centres.
Existing assessment-focused research, while certainly well-intentioned, can easily slip into naturalizing efficiency measures as the most adequate counter to the concerns around the ecological footprint of AI and data centres. This can narrow the public conversations that are so desperately needed in a moment of enormous and rapid technological transformation. In sum, reducing the story to one of closed-loops cooling systems will not resolve data centres contested futures.