AI, Data Centers, and Potable Water

IFI investments in AI data centers are booming, but their heavy reliance on potable water for cooling is straining communities and the environment. Exploring the balance between technological growth and responsible resource use is more urgent than ever.

Why AI Needs Data Centers

Data centers are essential to having modern technology work efficiently and consistently. Recently, there has been an unprecedented increase in investments for building data centers to help advance artificial intelligence’s capabilities, over $364 billion this past year from American companies (Litchtenberg 2025). With a high demand, AI needs data centers to meet these growing needs.

Data centers hold large amounts of data through hardware and software that is essential to companies’ everyday operations, networks, security, and more. To become more efficient and accurate, AI models need to be trained with more data and require a drastic increase in parallel processing when solving complex processing problems, through breaking this down into smaller ones by simultaneously using smaller processors (Flinders & Smalley 2024). In other words, it is like a team breaking down a major challenge by everyone having their assigned task that will contribute to the final solution. This can help us drastically reduce the amount of time and resources needed to address some of the major problems we face today by enabling more accurate health diagnoses and mitigating global warming. However, in that process, water consumption from these centers’ cooling systems is a concerning issue.

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