How much water do data centres use?

Why it matters

Data centres use water directly in cooling loops, evaporative cooling and humidification. They also use it indirectly, because power generation consumes water for fuel extraction, processing and generation. The total depends on cooling design, local climate and the grid's generation mix.

Water impact matters most where supplies are already under pressure. The same workload can have a very different water impact depending on the region it runs in.

An example

Take two cloud regions with similar grid carbon intensity. If one sits in a hot, dry area and relies on evaporative cooling, it can consume more water for each kWh, and that water comes from a scarcer local supply. A carbon report alone would show the two regions as equal.

How Greenpixie measures it

Greenpixie reports two water figures for every billing line, plus a measure of local water stress:

• cooling water, from the provider's published WUE multiplied by IT electricity
• generation water, from regional water intensity factors that reflect the local grid's mix
• a World Resources Institute global average where regional generation data is missing
• a water stress category for each cloud region, from Aqueduct 4.0

The water methodology was developed with Dr Shaolei Ren at the University of California, Riverside, and draws on the published work Making AI Less Thirsty by Li et al. The same factors feed GPX AI, where water per token is reported as cooling and generation water separately.