One data centre in Ireland withdrew 928 million litres of water in a single year. That is enough for 18,560 people. No planning authority required it to disclose this. No regulator tracked it. The water just disappeared — into cooling systems, into the air — while the planning documents said nothing about it.
We have just published research on data centre water consumption across the UK, Ireland and the European Union. What we found is not a simple horror story. It is something more troubling: a planning system that approves large infrastructure facilities without a basic requirement to answer the most obvious question — where does the water come from, and what happens to the catchment when it is gone?
That contrast is the heart of the story. Low-water data centres exist. They are not theoretical. The problem is that nobody is required to build one. An operator can choose evaporative cooling that consumes millions of litres a day, or air cooling that uses almost none — and the planning system will process both applications exactly the same way.
In England, 83% of data centre water consumption sits in the South East — already the most water-scarce region in the country. The Environment Agency estimated 1,125 million litres consumed in 2024–25, peaked in summer when rivers run lowest, and then said this figure is probably an undercount because data is missing for around 100 facilities. An Equinix site in Slough is licensed to abstract 367 million litres a year from groundwater. In Spain, Amazon formally applied to take 205 million litres a year from a canal — during a three-year drought.
The regulatory gap is not primarily about bad operators. Some data centres — Google's Dublin site, Microsoft's newer facilities in the Netherlands and Spain — are genuinely low-water by design. The gap is about a planning system that treats water as someone else's problem. The Environment Agency said so directly: future water demand forecasts are unlikely to capture data centre needs because growth is too fast and too little is known about cooling systems. The regulator is admitting its own system is blind.
We are calling for mandatory site-level water disclosure for every large data centre — annual use, peak day, potable share, cooling system type. We are calling for cumulative catchment assessment before consent. And we are calling for a formal test: if you want to use drinking water, prove you cannot use something else.
This is not a call to stop building data centres. It is a call to build them honestly — with full information in the room when decisions are made.
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