Artificial intelligence threatens to raid the water reserves of Europe’s driest regions
The EU wants to compete with the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence. But critics say policymakers haven’t planned for the sector’s extreme water demand.
By MARIANNE GROS
and LEONIE CATER
Illustration by Long Yan for POLITICO
This article is part of the Europe’s looming water crisis special report.
Aragon in northeastern Spain is a land of cornfields, peach farms and cherry orchards, where water was a precious commodity even before the advent of climate change.
Now, as the threat of drought increases, the farmers of Aragon could find themselves competing with a powerful and extremely thirsty new neighbor: Big Tech.
U.S. giants Microsoft and Amazon are investing billions to snatch up land in the increasingly water-stressed territory with the aim of building data centers, which typically use many millions of liters of water a year.
The Spanish and regional governments are ecstatic. The country’s former digital minister celebrated Amazon’s decision to move in last year, boasting that Spain is “at the forefront of technology innovation and Artificial Intelligence in Europe.” It goes hand-in-hand with the European Union’s push to build more data centers on home soil: The European Commission wants to triple the EU’s data center capacity over the next five to seven years.
But the locals aren’t buying what Big Tech is peddling.
While the likes of Amazon promise more than €15 billion of investment, jobs, partnerships with local schools, community education programs, water infrastructure updates and “sustainability initiatives,” grassroots groups are springing up, wary of tech giants muscling in on their water resources.
“In the end the farmer never wins,” said Chechu Sánchez, an Aragonese farmer speaking at an event on data centers in Zaragoza, Aragon’s capital. “Whenever there is plunder by foreign capital, the farmer, the people of the municipalities — we never win, we don’t benefit at all.”
Activist Aurora Gómez and her collective Tu Nube Seca Mi Río (which translates as “your cloud is drying up my river”) is heading up a campaign for a moratorium on all new data centers in Spain. Farmers, Europe’s most prolific water users, are among the most vulnerable, said Gómez, and — when they find out about the data centers’ water usage — the most incensed.
“People from agriculture are really, really angry because they realize that it is so difficult for them, fighting in this context of the climate emergency,” she told POLITICO. Local mayors and councilors, too, are joining the resistance.
This battle for water is playing out across Europe, from Ireland to France, complicating the bloc’s A.I. ambitions and posing a dilemma for EU policymakers.
A thirsty business
Much has been written about A.I.’s energy demand and carbon footprint. But running a data center is also extremely thirsty work. In 2024, Europe’s data center industry consumed about 62 million cubic meters of water, which is equivalent to about 24,000 Olympic swimming pools.
As the sector grows, consumption is expected to reach 90 million cubic meters by 2030, according to the water sector lobby Water Europe.
That’s because data centers generate a lot of heat and need to be cooled down constantly. Water is “key basically to these data centers, whether it’s for AI or whether it is for every time we send an email message or WhatsApp message, or every time we do a search on the Internet,” said Kevin Grecksch, a lecturer in water science at the University of Oxford.
Europe is facing increasingly frequent droughts, which are destroying soil health, threatening crop yields, and complicating the transport of goods by river.
Big Tech, meanwhile, has seen its water use soar. Microsoft’s water consumption nearly doubled in the three years from 2020 to 2023, nearing 8 million cubic meters, most of that going to cooling data centers. Amazon does not disclose its total water footprint.
For companies, it makes sense to build data centers in water-stressed areas, as in other respects dry regions often provide optimal conditions to run a data centers, which need lots of land and low humidity levels, said Grecksch.
Aragon “is an area where I travel with my students every year. We look at water issues and it’s a massive problem,” added Grecksch.
More data centers
But such environmental concerns aren’t slowing the global AI arms race. EU governments are determined to roll out more data centers across the continent as they attempt to catch up with AI leaders the U.S. and China.
One internal document obtained by POLITICO summarizes countries’ proposed strategies to promote the development of “sustainable, geographically balanced infrastructure optimized for AI and data processing within the EU.”
A draft of the European Commission’s upcoming Water Resilience Strategy, also obtained by POLITICO, notes that strategic sectors for the clean and digital transitions, including data centers, are consuming large amounts of water, and should be pressed to achieve maximum water savings in the future.
The Commission “will rate their overall sustainability and propose minimum performance standards, including water consumption.”
On the ground, residents remain skeptical.
The local mayor for the Villamayor de Gállego municipality near Zaragoza, Aragon is trying to push back on the plans of fund manager Azora to build a data center in his town.
“We believe this location should be reconsidered,” José Luis Montero told local media, adding that he hoped to met with the regional government to “clarify” the plans.
“This is not democracy,” said Gómez, “when you realize that the data center has more power than the local mayor.”
Grecksch, the Oxford University lecturer, said: “I would wish there would be a little bit more foresight and more integrative thinking around these things.”
Innovating the water stress away
When asked by POLITICO to explain what kind of measures the Spanish government has in place to protect local water resources as data centers continue to descend on the country, a spokesperson pointed to its Artificial Intelligence Strategy.
It “contemplates the sustainable deployment of data centers” and pitches a “seal” to denote sustainable data centers that are “energy efficient, use renewable energies, minimize their impact on water consumption.”
The regional Aragon government, too, denied that there will be any problems with water stress, arguing water consumption is “tightly controlled by the companies,” while the government “ensures that they are more efficient in terms of water and energy consumption.”
“This is made possible by the increasingly advanced technology that is being implemented, often for the first time in the world, in Aragon.”
Some also argue that prioritizing resource allocation to tech innovations like AI is essential because these technologies will help European companies be less resource intensive in the future.
Microsoft believes AI will help manage water and energy efficiency, providing net improvements to both, the company’s global sustainability policy lead Michelle Patron told POLITICO. In Spain, where Microsoft has four data centers, the company is also using AI. “to look at the local utilities, the pipe [infrastructure] to identify where there are leaks, to be able to enable less water loss,” she said.
Others point to the breakthroughs in making data centers more water efficient. “I see technology improvements moving from in the data center [industry], moving from air cooling of the GPUs to liquid cooling, which will further improve by 30 to 40 percent the usage of cooling and the usage of water,” said Georgios Stassis, chairman and chief executive officer of PPC, a major utilities company operating in South East Europe.
Microsoft has also flaunted a new data center design that would recycle water through a “closed loop.”
Greenwashing risks
Amid rising concerns over water stress, tech companies are eager to promote their efforts in innovating cooling systems to use less water, but also boast about compensating for that consumption in other ways.
“The majority of our water usage comes from our data centers,” Microsoft’s Patron told POLITICO, adding that the company plans to be water positive by 2030 which means that they “put more water into the local basins where we operate than we withdraw,” she added.
Amazon’s cloud provider service, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has the same target, while Google has pledged to “replenish 120 percent of the freshwater volume we consume, on average, across our offices and data centers by 2030.”
Activist Gómez claims that’s all greenwashing.
“Amazon, they made a huge campaign [saying] we are going to be water positive, we are going to be so efficient and so on,” she said. “But at the same time, they are asking for 48 percent more water in Spain to expand their data centers.”
Oxford University’s Grecksch says it’s “completely wrong” and “a misunderstanding of the basic science [to say] that you can replenish more water that you took out, that’s just physically impossible.”
Water moves on a continuous and natural cycle known as the hydrologic cycle, transitioning between physical stages: solid, liquid and gas.
“There is a limited amount of water available,” says Grecksch. “This is like saying we created gold.”
The post Artificial intelligence threatens to raid the water reserves of Europe’s driest regions appeared first on Politico.
