Water and the hidden cost of AI data centres
Sydney Water is preparing for data centres to consume 25% of Sydney’s water by 2035.
No data centre operating in Australia is required to disclose how much water it consumes, nor is there a law currently requiring any of them to recycle it. And even if they do, the cooling process generates toxins hard to get rid of.
The water that passes through data centre cooling systems does not come out the same as it went in. Biocides, heavy metals, corrosion inhibitors and PFAS — forever chemicals that do not break down in the environment — accumulate in cooling water and are discharged into municipal water systems. Once in the supply, those chemicals cannot be removed by standard treatment.
This is already an issue in the US.
The peak industry body, Data Centre Australia, confirmed this year that questions about chemical waste from its members’ facilities were the first it had received on the subject. When those facilities eventually decommission their hardware, the environmental and financial cost of safe disposal will fall somewhere — on industry, on government, or on the public.
No Australian government has said which.
https://michaelwest.com.au/waste-tsunami-water-and-the-hidden-cost-of-ai-data-centres/
23 replies
I am of the opinion that water use of datacenters is very misleading and difficult to accurately account for/compare so not that useful.
It's easy enough for the industry to propose regenerative loops, or point to the enormous utility of datacenters (they're not all serving slop, some are things that matter). You can also point to stuff like water useage of coke (literally poison), animal ag, or rich people's stupid non native vanity gardens which are huge to muddy the waters.
Sydney should not host datacenters for reasons like: land use and noise pollution, enormous power consumption and grid destabilisation (which also uses water btw), low economic benefit (few jobs, untaxable multinationals, strain on infrastructure).
Ireland, a much wetter, flatter, and less on fire nation previously tried to leverage hosting datacenters for economic benefit. It was been an unmitigated disaster and new connections to the grid were banned till this year.
Hank Green has a great video about datacentres and water use, mostly around how there are so many ways to interpret and understand the scale.
It takes 486 litres of water to produce one kilogram of Australian beef, and in the 2025-26 period, 2.985 million tonnes (2985 million kg) was produced. So that's 1,450,710,000,000 litres of water used by the beef industry.
Going by the chart's figure of 5 million liters for one "large datacenter", the Australian beef industry uses 290,142 large datacenters of water.
You say this like rain wasn't falling on the paddocks and farms where the cows are. Hell, loads (if not most) of Australia's cattle stations aren't even on the town water schemes in the first place.
There is a point here that you are making, and it is even worth talking about to an extent - we do eat beef at a rate that is unsustainable long-term. But in the context of what we're talking about where discussion is about connecting these buildings up to our drinking water supplies, your point isn't really very relevant just now.
That's just whataboutism.
You don't think it's fair enough for an industry that didn't have water rules to fight back when rules start being written that specifically target them?
I think data centres use too much water and should be forced into building closed loop systems for example but this is the perfect time to fight back against all poor water usage everywhere.
Whataboutisms distract from the topic by bringing up another topic. We're still explicitly on water use as a topic here and they have a point, if we want to criticise data centres for their water use, then we have to criticise golf courses, the meat industry, and lawns too, for the same reason: Decadent waste of a vital resource
See it like this: A whataboutism is "No, because [insert distraction]", what we have here is "Yes, and [insert related thing] too"
Data centres to agriculture seems like a pretty big jump in topic to me.
Both are terrible and need to go ASAP. Not just in Australia, but everywhere.
Let's be clear here: Australia does not at present have any AI data centres. All the data centres and their woes as described in the article are in other countries. This is not happening here.
You could say this of any business. It's a nothing-burger. There are dozens of data centres in Australia providing regular hosting to all sorts of companies, and articles like this never really talk about how good normal data centres are. I worry that all these fearmongering articles are going to taint all data centres with the same brush as AI data centres. There genuinely are valid concerns to raise and discuss. But these articles only talk about the worst-case impact, never educating people about potential steps to mitigate those concerns before they happen here.
There are solutions to the power and water issues. They are complicated, though. These things can be largely sustainable, though it is a lot more expensive to build them that way. Will they be built with sustainable infrastructure attached? Who can say. Proposals for this have been raised and ministers even agree it's a good idea.
Will Australia get AI data centres? Yes, we'll probably end up getting a few in the next decade or so.
Will these issues matter as they are constructed? Yes.
Do they have to use so much water? Actually no. The water used for cooling does not need to be drinking water. A private dam that cycles water around the data centre is a possible solution to drastically reduce water requirements as the water is used over and over.
What about power? This is a true concern. AI data centres use crazy amounts of power. As much as a medium sized town.
Ideally, any Data centres with these requirements will also be placed away from suburbia, and be mostly self-sufficient with their power and water requirements. We have the space and the technology. It is yet to be determined whether we have the will to force them to be built this way. Their owners are not going to want to do it, they will need to be compelled.
...because most businesses do not need their own power stations and huge amounts of water to dissipate the heat.
Who cares if it's drinking water? We're talking about avoiding droughts. In this context water is water.
...and how does that body of water lose the energy it's "taking away". Evaporation? Well it's not reusing that water then.
At some point if you need to dumps GW of heat quickly, you're evaporating water. It might be in cooling towers. It might be from open reservoirs. It might be at the power station that powers your air-con units. It doesn't make a lot of difference. It's all evaporative cooling at some point.
You know how when your computer gets super busy, it's fans fire up and it starts to get hot? That's what a server in an AI data centre is doing - 24/7.
You know how most of the time, your PC is just chilling, doing its thing without all that noise? That's what a server in a regular data centre is doing. They're a lot noisier than your PC, but nothing like one in a Data Centre. Servers in these places are of course using power and water, but it's a fraction of the requirements of an AI data centre.
We all care. That's the entire point. If the Data Centre is using drinking water, we can't. If you are in the UK, you probably haven't had to worry about water restrictions and droughts like we have. This is a massive factor in our thinking. I can't drink grey water. But a data centre can use it to cool a server. Water that is evaporating and going into the atmosphere will rain down again. And with a nation as big as ours, it'll likely still land in our country. We aren't too bothered about water evaporating - that's what it does. Heat and pollution in the atmosphere are a bad thing. Water, not so much.
These data centres are coming. There's no point being a luddite about it and trying to stop that entirely. There is however serious value in making them as clean as possible with a view to the future. Especially if we can get some smart rules in-place before they arrive.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/sep/01/summer-2026-uk-hottest-on-record-provisional-met-office-data
How is anything you wrote in favour of these data centres?
You cannot make something that requires gigawatts of power to be dissipated 24/7 "clean". They are not inevitable, but they need us to believe that they are.
I've tried to reply to this a couple of times and not come off as condescending. I truly have. But I'm sorry, it just makes me laugh. Hottest UK summer on record "peaked at 38.1C"?
I mean, yes - that's hot. I'll grant you that. But we get a whole season of that. Hell, parts of Australia (not the cities) get above 50. I think all the cities will see days in the 40s every year.
So, I stand by my previous comment. You probably haven't had to deal with water restrictions in the UK.
I hope you are right, and I come back to this in the coming years and apologise to you for my insistence that these things are coming. I don't believe you are right, though.
Nath, as a self-proclaimed luddite I'd like to explain to you that luddites, historically, were workers that rebelled against industrial change that took their skilled jobs away and did NOT give them viable options other than menial, repetitive labour at a lower rate of pay. The 19th century industrial revolution made a minority wealthy and brought misery to a majority.
A luddite is not just someone who says 'no' to change because they don't like change. They can see the dehumanisation embedded in new technology and object vehemently to it. There are MANY issues regarding the use of AI which are potentially and definitively harmful to life on this planet. We must not overlook any of them.
EDIT: Some call the era we are entering post-human fascism.
And how successful has any luddite movement in history been, ever?
AI is just getting started. In fact, what we have now isn't even AI yet. That's just the term used for Language Learning Models. It isn't intelligent at all, it's kind of a turbo Google, which is good at aggregating human knowledge into something that sounds coherent. Do I love it? Not really. Could I personally live without it? Easily and happily. Will I be employable in 10 years if I choose to live without it? Doubtful. It is here, and it won't go away.
Even if Australia gets zero AI data centres, it won't stop it being widely available to Australians. It is already widely used in Australia. So, at best you can say we saved Australia from the environmental impact of AI, while Australians actively contribute to the impact AI data centres make in other nations.
A little history. I hope you find this interesting and enjoyable. https://socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/the-real-luddites/ Quote:
.........
Not saying it would be easy but we could have more intentional communities where AI tech is kept to a minimum and in which food could be grown, and skills learnt in building, and so on, e.g the Amish and similar groups.
Ok, so that may sound extreme but we need to live lives in which AI is not an evil presence that takes over every aspect. AI and the fiddlers behind it need to be strictly regulated and not allowed to destroy the remaining vestiges of democracy and social order. If malicious AI agents break into banking or security / weapons systems we could have the destruction of much of 'advanced' society and/or the imposition of extreme authoritarianism. Those village folks who live off their vegie gardens, their chooks and a few other stock may be the only civilisation that can survive.
This infographic seems wrong to the point of lying.
There are not 250 large data centres, I have no doubt there are 250 DC around Australia, I doubt all 250 use the amount of water this infographic claims.
Was this infographic not meant to be read in the context of forecasting? The article states that this story is based upon Sydney's water authority planning, I didn't read it as current figures? Seems more pressing to me to be planning for the future, not waiting till it arrives then trying to mitigate the world of problems we are in.
While I think it is fine to address it assuming the worst case forecast, there is next to no chance that many will ever be built. The AI, and tech industry are in a very obvious bubble, after all, and I'd be surprised if more than a handful end up being built and used.
We should damn well make sure they supply their own renewable energy to power any that are built, however. Otherwise they can fuck off.
I'm in Tasmania we have already had Firmus ignoring planning conditions, we need regulation so tight that the slightest breach results in people (or CEOs I'd accept either) spend a lot of time in prison. We need to make the current round of monorail salesmen sweat blood at every opportunity.
Tell that to the Qld govt.
This is likely fake news and doesn't use public information.
This doesn't contain numbers: https://datacenter.uptimeinstitute.com/rs/711-RIA-145/images/2025.Annual.Survey.Report.pdf?version=0 doesn't contain numbers regarding water use.
The 2026 report isn't available to the public yet. https://uptimeinstitute.com/resources/research-and-reports/uptime-institute-global-data-center-survey-results-2026
Water use of Datacenters for evaporative cooling, cooling loops and reservoir heat exchange may be lumped in together. These used have wildly different characteristics and implications.