There's been a fair amount of coverage about how much strain AI data centres are and are going to be putting on the National Grid, but not so much coverage about the strain being put on our water supply...
Water is different to electricity, and more interesting, because water is local, visible and rationed in a way electricity isn't. Nobody has yet banned you from charging your phone. They have, in at least nine supply areas this summer, banned you from using a hosepipe.
Melanie McDonagh made the point sharply in the Telegraph recently: in a summer of parched parks and drought-stricken farmland, we are quietly enforcing a technology that competes directly for the one resource we've just told households they can't have: water!
Rationing is a moral statement
We have actually had two consecutive summer droughts. This is not a freak week of sunshine.
And consider how the shortage was allocated. Households were told to stop watering the garden. Data centres, classified as critical national infrastructure, carried on drawing supply — and, under current Environment Agency rules, drawing drinking-quality water, because that is what they are permitted to use for cooling. You may take your own view on whether a chatbot's thermal management outranks a pensioner's tomatoes, but let us at least be clear that a view has been taken, and that nobody was asked.
The figures nobody has to publish
We do not know how much water these sites consume, because British operators are under no obligation to say. In the EU they are. Here, the Environment Agency's national water resources framework doesn't count data centres at all, and the government's own AI growth zone policy manages not to mention water once.
That is not a technical oversight. It is the classic move of treating a resource as infinite until it visibly isn't — the same assumption that produced the leakage record, the sewage record and thirty years of not building reservoirs. Meanwhile the great majority of proposed new sites are earmarked for areas already under water stress, which is either a spectacular coincidence or evidence that the siting decisions are being made on fibre routes and land prices rather than hydrology.
Sustainability as a selective virtue
Ministers have been overruling council objections to push new sites through. The same government talks a great deal about sustainability. Both things are true simultaneously, and the contradiction resolves neatly once you notice that growth is a national good with a named minister attached, while water stress is a local problem belonging to a planning committee nobody has heard of.
That's the sociology of it. Costs that can be dispersed across a region get discounted to nearly nothing; benefits that can be announced at a podium get counted twice.
Final thoughts
I am not against data centres, but infrastructure designated as critical to the nation ought to face obligations proportionate to that status, starting with mandatory disclosure of what it takes out of the ground and a requirement to use non-potable supply where it's technically possible.
Until then we have a drought with a hierarchy in it, and the households at the bottom of it are being asked to accept the discipline of scarcity while nobody will tell them who else is drinking.
