The New Dark Age

Friday, 14 February 2025 — Foxglove

Are Big Tech’s plans to build hundreds of massive new data centres around the UK going to cause water shortages for the rest of us?

Foxglove has conducted new research which reveals the staggering amount of water used by data centres to keep their computers cool. We’ve found a worrying lack of plans to ensure building more data centres doesn’t lead to water shortages for UK homes and businesses.

Perhaps most alarming of all, we discovered that the UK’s biggest water company, Thames Water, doesn’t even know how much water it supplies to data centres, or how many data centres sit within its supply grid.

Angela Rayner MP is the government minister in charge of planning applications. Right now she’s using her powers to push through approvals for new data centres. Please can you send her an email, asking her to explain how she’s going to protect long term water supplies and ensure that building new data centres will not cause shortages? Click here to get started:

Research from Foxglove’s investigation suggests that a newly built hyperscale data centre would consume, on average, between 1.5-2 million litres of fresh, mains water per day. That’s tap water from the same supply which we all rely on. And the government’s own analysis says that by 2050, even without building new data centres, the UK is already looking at a shortfall of nearly five billion litres of water every day to have enough to drink and live as we do now.

So the question we need to be asking Angela Rayner is: how are we going to find another five billion litres of water every day to have enough to drink, at the same time as building new hyperscale data centres which each consume millions more litres per day? And how can we even begin to think of a solution to that problem, when the existing water suppliers for data centres can’t even say for sure how much water they actually use right now?

Angela Rayner’s department may be tempted to try to brush these long-term issues under the carpet. That’s where some public pressure can help. If lots of us send emails to her department demanding answers about the water impact of data centres, it will force a response – and help expose the dangerous lack of a plan to make sure data centres don’t lead to water shortages for the rest of us.

Please help add to the pressure, by emailing Angela Rayner now. We’ve made it easy by including some suggested text for you to use.

Thanks for your help,

Martha

MORE INFORMATION

The BBC covered our investigation in this report:

BBC – Concern UK’s AI ambitions could lead to water shortages

You can also read more about the research on the Foxglove website:

Foxglove – We’re all now in a battle for drinking water with H20-guzzling data centres – and we’re losing