Revealed: Big tech's new datacentres will take water from the world's driest areas

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Wed 9 Apr 2025 07.30 EDT
Luke Barratt, Costanza Gambarini and data graphics by Andrew Witherspoon and Aliya Uteuova

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are operating datacentres that use vast amounts of water in some of the world’s driest areas and are building many more, an investigation by SourceMaterial and the Guardian has found. With Donald Trump pledging to support them, the three technology giants are planning hundreds of datacentres in the US and across the globe, with a potentially huge impact on populations already living with water scarcity.

“The question of water is going to become crucial,” said Lorena Jaume-Palasí, founder of the Ethical Tech Society. “Resilience from a resource perspective is going to be very difficult for those communities.” Efforts by Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, to mitigate its water use have sparked opposition from inside the company, SourceMaterial’s investigation found, with one of its own sustainability experts warning that its plans are “not ethical”.

In response to questions from SourceMaterial and the Guardian, spokespeople for Amazon and Google defended their developments, saying they always take water scarcity into account. Microsoft declined to provide a comment. Datacentres, vast warehouses containing networked servers used for the remote storage and processing of data, as well as by information technology companies to train AI models such as ChatGPT, use water for cooling. SourceMaterial’s analysis identified 38 active datacentres owned by the big three tech firms in parts of the world already facing water scarcity, as well as 24 more under development.

Datacentres’ locations are often industry secrets. But by using local news reports and industry sources Baxtel and Data Center Map, SourceMaterial compiled a map of 632 datacentres – either active or under development – owned by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. It shows that those companies’ plans involve a 78% increase in the number of datacentres they own worldwide as cloud computing and AI cause a surge in the world’s demand for storage, with construction planned in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/09/big-tech-datacentres-water?

[rich7862]

1. Look at the warmer states in the west, they are already in desperate need of water.