Datacentres’ surging consumption of water has prompted UK officials to advise drought-struck citizens to delete old photos and emails from cloud-based services to ease pressure on supplies.
The advice came in a government communique following a meeting of the UK’s National Drought Group to address a “nationally significant” water shortfall in England.
The report said that five areas are officially in drought, while six more were experiencing “prolonged dry weather following the driest six months to July since 1976.”
The Environment Agency’s Director of Water and NDG chair, Helen Wakeham called on “everyone” to do what they could to ease the pressure on supplies.
That included water companies “quickly” fixing leaks. The statement also highlighted plans for new reservoirs and other infrastructure.
But Wakeham quickly moved on to the public’s ability to make “everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails.”
A list of measures to save water at home included installing a rain butt, fixing leaking toilets, and taking shorter showers.
But it concluded with a call to “Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.”
There’s no doubt that datacentres consumer vast amounts of power – while ever more power dense racks need aircon to cool them. This has a knock on effect on water. Water is used in electricity production. And many datacentres still rely on traditional evaporative cooling, which requires fresh water.
However, while storage of photos and emails will have some environmental footprint, production business workloads are generally far more intense, while AI workloads will outstrip even these.
Meanwhile, Chancellor Rachel Reeves, is reportedly pushing for a further overhaul of UK planning laws to speed up development of critical infrastructure, including datacentres and green energy production.
The government is desperate to attract more investment into datacentres in the UK, in part to underpin AI and other high-tech sectors. But communities are increasingly pushing back against new datacentres, not least on power and environmental grounds..
