AI (artificial intelligence) is thirsty, and water in India isn’t unlimited. So, the industry is designing data centres that stop drinking it.
At its very heart, a data centre is an extremely expensive way of turning electricity into heat, with a little computation as a by-product. At a recent Society of Intellectuals lecture on what goes on behind the scenes of AI data centres, one comparison particularly stayed with me: without naming the cooling design, asking how much water a 100 MW (megawatt) data centre uses is like asking how much fuel a car uses without mentioning the car in question.
Depending on how it’s cooled, the very same facility could have a very different water footprint. However, getting rid of that heat takes power, and in India, it also takes water, which the country is mightily short of: India has only 4% of the world’s freshwater resources, a far small figure to quench the thirst of 18% of the world’s population, which it houses. Here’s what’s all the more concerning: the cloud is about to get a lot bigger.
Cloud–‘Thirst’
For data centres, cooling is undoubtedly the biggest line item after the servers themselves. It accounts for nearly 30-40% of a data centre’s energy use. The other bill that racks up is water, and the industry projections are staggering. India’s data centre water usage for 2025 stands at 150 billion litres, which is expected to increase to a whopping 358 billion litres by 2030.
In fact, 2 million litres a day can be used by a single 100MW facility using conventional evaporative cooling, most of which is lost to the atmosphere. Furthermore, location makes it worse. Nearly 75% of India’s data centres are already located in water-stressed regions.
A Tale Of Thirsty Cities
To say that the stats are alarming is an understatement. For instance, Karnataka reportedly hosts around 32 data centres, of which nearly 30 of them sit in the capital Bengaluru, which has been facing continuous water shortages for years. In fact, the state’s own Central Ground Water Board found that the city consumes nearly 10 times the amount of water it recharges annually. In fact, Karnataka’s IT minister called data centres a “necessary evil.”
Then there’s Hyderabad, a city that faces a projected water shortage of nearly 870 million litres per day by 2027.
How can we forget Delhi-NCR, where shallower wells are failing around data centre parks, and deeper sources are still being explored? In Noida, where summer temperatures (in)famously reach 48 degrees Celsius, a data centre draws far more water in a heatwave than in regular weather. Last but not least, it pains to even bring up the case of Chennai, which reached “Day Zero” in June 2019, when all four of the city’s main water reservoirs ran completely dry. And yet, it remains a much-sought-after location for new data centre capacity because of its submarine cable connectivity.
Basically, the machines need the most water exactly when the city has the least.
What Are Closed Loop Systems – And What’s The Catch?
Basically, a closed loop data centre works akin to a car radiator. A coolant circulates through a sealed circuit, picks up heat at the servers, releases it elsewhere and returns to do it again. The evaporative cooling gets rid of heat by evaporating water, which then has to be replaced, making it a tap that never closes.
On the other hand, closed-loop liquid cooling recirculates more than 95% of its coolant, making it a stark contrast against traditional evaporative cooling, where 85% of the water is lost to the atmosphere.
So, what’s the catch? Not surprisingly, closed loops move the cost around. Methods that minimise water consumption, such as air cooling or certain closed-loop systems, might need more electricity to move air and reject heat. That matters because power is the other side of the trade. According to S&P Global estimates, Indian data centres used about 13 TWh of electricity in 2024, which was nearly 0.8% of the then-national demand, with projections expected to reach 57 TWh by 2030.
Chillers are usually necessary in India’s semi-arid, humid, and hot zones, even with liquid cooling. Some sites even switch to evaporative methods when the temperatures peak, especially since even liquid-cooled facilities aren’t automatically water-free. The best bit is that Indian operators are already moving this way. CtrlS and Equinix, among others, say they use air-cooled chillers, where the heat exchange happens on the data centre’s terrace and the water stays in a closed loop.
However, there’s no doubt that proof is required. After all, closing the loop is one thing, and showing the receipts is another.
Should Resource Scarcity Be The Design Brief Now?
Until not long ago, water was a line on a utility bill. Today, it decides where a data centre can be built. In water-stressed cities, cooling designs can determine whether facilities secure water access at all as local governance tightens, thus changing how buildings are planned. Even after all this, reporting rules still haven’t caught up, whether it’s the non-disclosure of water consumption or the absence of a liquid cooling mandate.
While experts are pushing for stricter standards, the better question to ponder on isn’t whether data centres consume resources; it’s what we get in return for the electricity, water and land they use.
In case you missed:
- Offshore Data Centres: The Next Frontier
- The World’s Craziest Data Centres – Part 2: The Race for Innovation
- Data Centre in a Mine Located in The Alps. What’s Next for Underground Data Centres?
- Is “White Hat” Hacking A Tactic For Ransom Now?
- India’s DPDP Act: Data Privacy Or Data Surveillance?
- RAMpocalypse Now: Is Memory Shortage Crippling Global Tech?
- Is ‘Superintelligence’ Really Coming For Us: The Truths Told And The Myths Busted
- All About AI Sovereignty: Why It Matters To India
- A Complete Guide To Open-Source Software
- The Return of Retro Tech: Old Tech, New Tricks
