You asked a simple question to Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the phone, ‘How will the weather be today?’ The reply also came within seconds. But the thing that consumes behind this one question is an entire bottle of water. Yes, every time you talk to AI, water is steaming from the chimney of a data center somewhere. This water can be for your drinking, irrigation of fields or city supply. After all, how much water is consumed in a data center?
Why does a data center need so much water?
Data centers are not offices, but huge halls filled with thousands of servers. These servers spew heat 24 hours a day. If they are not cooled they will melt. A lot of water is used for this cooling. Through evaporation in cooling towers or in thermal plants that generate electricity, because data centers will die without electricity.
How much water does a data center drink every day?
According to the report of the American organization Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), an average 100 MW hyperscale data center consumes 30 to 50 lakh gallons of water every day. If we convert it into litres, it is 1.1 crore to 1.9 crore liters per day. Understand it this way:
- A person needs 3-4 liters of water to drink daily.
- A single 100 MW data center consumes so much water every day, which can meet the daily drinking needs of 30 lakh to 50 lakh people.
- The daily water consumption of a data center is equivalent to a large part of the daily drinking water requirement of Mumbai city with a population of 2 crore.
How did Google and Microsoft drink the water of cities?
If we talk about America’s leading tech companies, the figures are even more shocking:
- Google reported in its 2023 environmental report that its data centers and offices around the world used 5.6 billion gallons of water that year. That means about 21,200 crore litres. Out of this, a Google data center located in The Dulce city of America alone drank 15 lakh gallons (about 57 lakh liters) of water every day. This was 29% of the total water supply of that entire area.
- Microsoft’s data center in Goodyear, Arizona, used more than 56 million liters of water in 2022, while the area was suffering from drought.
One day’s water for data center is equivalent to an entire season’s crop.
In case of Indian agriculture, one acre of wheat crop requires about 20-25 lakh liters of water in the entire season (from sowing to harvesting). Now take the example of Google’s data center in The Dalles, which consumes 57 lakh liters of water daily. That is, this single data center drinks so much water every day that it can produce an entire wheat crop of about two and a half acres.
If we calculate the entire year, the annual water requirement of this data center will be more than 200 crore litres, which is equivalent to irrigating 800-1000 acres of wheat for the entire season. This is not the water requirement of a small farmer, but of a big agricultural farm.
Thirst for AI: How much water is wasted talking to a chatbot?
According to a research study published in the Nature paper, it takes an estimated 7 million liters of fresh water to train a large language model like GPT-4. When you ask 10 to 50 questions to that chatbot, in just one conversation a half liter water bottle turns into steam and disappears forever.
If we compare it with a swimming pool, an Olympic size swimming pool holds approximately 25 lakh liters of water. About three Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water was used to train GPT-4. Due to the number of people around the world who are using AI chatbots every day, the water in dozens of swimming pools is turning into steam every day.
Are we prepared for the flood of data centers in India?
The data center industry in India is growing at an explosive pace. According to NASSCOM report, the total capacity of data centers in India was 950 MW in 2024, which is estimated to increase to 1,700 MW by 2026. If we make a general estimate that every 100 MW data center consumes an average of 15 million liters of water daily, then:
- In 2024, all the data centers of India were consuming about 14 crore liters of water every day.
- By 2026, this figure may exceed 25 crore liters per day.
Now compare this with the needs of humans. 25 crore liters of water is equal to the daily drinking needs of more than 8 crore people. This means that after just two years, India’s data centers will drink so much water that it can quench the thirst of one-third of the people of Uttar Pradesh with a population of 24 crore.
The interesting thing is that these data centers are being set up in cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, where there is already water shortage.
Is there any solution to this wastage of water?
According to experts, the pressure on tech companies is now increasing. Google and Microsoft have promised to be ‘water positive’ by 2030, that is, they will clean and return more water than they consume. Technologies like ‘air cooling’ and ‘liquid immersion cooling’ are now being introduced in new data centers, in which the use of water becomes almost zero.
Plans are also being made for cooling with recycled waste water and sea water. At present the truth is that our digital life is running on an unseen thirst.
The next time you watch a video on your phone, scroll through social media, or ask AI to draw a funny picture, stop for a moment. Behind the scenes, the cooling tower of some data center might be steaming water from a farmer’s field to fulfill your small wish. This debate is not about technology versus nature, but about our thinking.
