There is a reason why Big Tech has been so super-secretive about its water use. It’s because it was getting it so cheap that it wasn’t even worth measuring it. Water was this invisible externality, and because it was invisible to the public, Big Tech could keep telling the story of how it was becoming more and more efficient, more and more green, more and more “in the Cloud.” The cloud is on the ground. Big Tech abuses and misuses water at an alarming rate, treating it as essentially a free resource, and to keep on doing that, it was essential that the public should not know what was happening.

“Water consumption in data centers is super embarrassing,” a data center designer stated as far back as 2009. “It just doesn’t feel responsible.” Survey after survey showed that about 60% of data centers saw “no business justification for collecting water usage data.” Think about that. They were getting the water so cheap they didn’t even bother metering it. In a Microsoft data center in San Antonio, Texas, it was found that the actual cost of water should have been 11 times higher than what the company was paying. In drought-stricken Holland, a Microsoft data center slurped 84 million liters of drinking water in one year, when the local authority said the facility would only need 12 to 20 million liters.

Data centers know they have been hugely abusive of their water use and thus are desperate to hide usage figures from the general public. “There were actually water documents tracking how much this data-center campus was using,” journalist Karen Ho explained about a Microsoft data center. “But when the city came back with documents about that, everything was blacked out. They said that it was proprietary to Microsoft and therefore they couldn’t provide that information.” Public water use is proprietary to Microsoft. Sounds about right.

“The reason there’s not a lot of transparency, simply put, I think most companies don’t have a good story here,” stated Kyle Myers, a senior manager at a data center company. Data centers have a choice. They can either consume less water and use more electricity. Or they can use less energy and consume more water. “Water is super cheap,” Myers said. “And so people make the financial decision that it makes sense to consume water.”

In 2023, Bluefield Research estimated that, on a global basis, data centers were using more than 360 billion liters of water a year, including water used in energy generation. It predicted this figure would rise to over 600 billion liters a year by 2030. However, China Water Risk estimated that in 2024 China’s data centers alone used about 1.3 trillion liters of water, which is the equivalent of what 26 million people need. This amount would grow to more than 3 trillion liters a year by 2030, due to the explosive growth of AI. Which figures are correct? We don’t know.