To: The Office for Environmental Protection, Climate Change Committee, Andrew Burnham
Stop AI datacentres using up needless amounts of clean drinking water
The UK should introduce legislation banning the use of wasteful evaporative cooling systems, which use up huge amounts of fresh drinking water from our limited supply.
Why is this important?
AI data centres are using evaporative cooling to maintain their equipment, drawing on our limited clean water supply, running it through their systems and losing large quantities to evaporation. Larger data centres can use up to 5 million gallons of clean water per day – enough for a town of up to 50,000 people. This directly threatens the survival of people living near data centres and our climate.
While large swathes of the general public are under a hosepipe ban, AI datacentres are allowed to use and waste millions of gallons of clean drinking water a day, simply because they don't feel like investing in less wasteful systems. In a country that experiences annual droughts (in part due to water company incompetence but lets not even start on that) this is not acceptable.
They have chosen this method because it is cheapest and easiest for them, least impactful for the company's bottom line. But alternative methods exist that can reduce water consumption by up to 70%, it would just require effort and investment on the part of the company. If AI companies want to use British land for their technology, they will need to invest in protecting the environment here.
AI is coming, we will only end up with more data centres. This water wastage will only increase while our supply stays the same. Who loses out? The British public.
While large swathes of the general public are under a hosepipe ban, AI datacentres are allowed to use and waste millions of gallons of clean drinking water a day, simply because they don't feel like investing in less wasteful systems. In a country that experiences annual droughts (in part due to water company incompetence but lets not even start on that) this is not acceptable.
They have chosen this method because it is cheapest and easiest for them, least impactful for the company's bottom line. But alternative methods exist that can reduce water consumption by up to 70%, it would just require effort and investment on the part of the company. If AI companies want to use British land for their technology, they will need to invest in protecting the environment here.
AI is coming, we will only end up with more data centres. This water wastage will only increase while our supply stays the same. Who loses out? The British public.
