Times figures for data centres’ use of water don’t reflect average daily demand

A Times article about data centres last week said that “Water UK, an industry body, expects the demand from future centres to reach 42 million litres of water per day, up from 14 million litres now”.

Water UK, the trade association for the water industry, did use these figures in April, but it was referring to “average peak demands”, such as on hot summer days when data centres’ water consumption is at its highest.

When talking about average daily demand, Water UK used figures that were less than half as large, saying: “Data centres currently use approximately 6.6 million litres of water per day. It is equivalent to the water used by 20,000 average homes.

“With the government’s ambition to treble data centre capacity by 2030, this could increase to 19.8 million litres, equivalent to 60,000 homes.”

In a “worst case scenario”, where all new data centres “performed in line with the least water efficient data centres”, Water UK estimates that peak demand would rise to 77 million litres per day. Overall, it said data centres “present several policy and regulatory challenges for the management of water systems”.

For context, while the Environment Agency says that data on water demand from data centres is often hard to find, it estimates that the 40% of England’s golf courses that extract their own water have a peak demand of about 24 million litres per day.

When Full Fact contacted the Times about this, it directed us to an earlier article that used the same figures correctly in reference to average peak demand.

Data centres are buildings that house the computers that support the world’s growing use of the internet and AI. The government has announced plans to build more data centres in the coming years.