UK weighs water priority for AI data centers during droughts

Designating data centers as critical infrastructure prioritizes computational uptime over residential water conservation, framing digital sovereignity as a primary resource concern. For streaming and cloud providers, this provides a shield against environmental service disruptions but risks severe public backlash and regulatory tightening. As AI workloads increase thermal density, the industry must transition from evaporative cooling to water-efficient closed-loop or liquid systems to maintain social license to operate. Watch for the UK government to publish a formal 'drought hierarchy' that clarifies where private server farms sit relative to household and agricultural needs.

The debate over data center resource consumption has intensified as the UK government targets a 20-fold expansion of sovereign compute capacity by 2030. In July 2026, Water UK described government AI growth plans as "fatally flawed" for excluding cooling requirements from national forecasts. Per The Guardian, the water supplier Affinity Water reported that some individual data centers in Slough have requested up to 3 million liters of drinking water per day—a volume equivalent to the peak demand of 3,500 homes. These requests come as a May 2026 House of Lords report predicted that England faces a 5 billion liter daily water shortfall by 2055.

Regulators across Europe are already moving to enforce transparency through standardized metrics. Effective September 2024, the EU Energy Efficiency Directive requires data centers with at least 500kW of IT power to report specific water usage and power efficiency data to a central database. In the UK, techUK's August 2025 survey found that while 51% of sites already use waterless cooling, a handful of high-consumption facilities account for the majority of the sector's footprint. Per Reuters, investors in the U.S. have also filed resolutions in April 2026 pressuring hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google to disclose site-level water consumption after major project cancellations due to local community opposition.