Environmental activists have warned that the expansion of data centres, driven by the boom in artificial intelligence, threatens to impose significant burdens on Germany's water supply.
According to a brief study conducted by the German “Oko” Institute, which specializes in environmental research and commissioned by the “Greenpeace” organization concerned with the environment, server centers in Germany consumed about 13 billion liters of water for cooling purposes during the year 2025. This need may rise to 27 billion liters annually by 2030, as a result of the construction of new giant data centers, which is equivalent to the drinking water consumption of a major city with a population of about 580 thousand people.
Different situation!
These new calculations clearly contradict statements issued by the digital economy sector. The German Association for the Information and Communications Technology Sector (Bitkom) recently considered that the water needs of data centers do not represent a major problem in general. She pointed out that about two-thirds of facilities in Germany consume a maximum of 1.0 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of electricity consumption in the field of information technology, and therefore only need small amounts of water. The association added that the most important consumption is mainly limited to evaporative cooling systems.
In contrast, the OCO Institute, after excluding faulty data sets from the government registry of data centers, found a weighted average of 67.0 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of IT electricity consumption.
The current annual consumption of 13 billion liters is equivalent to the entire amount of water in Lake Wansee in the capital, Berlin. The planned major projects are of particular importance in this context, as experts estimate that a single data center with a capacity of 100 megawatts annually needs between 200 and 930 million liters of water, depending on the cooling technology used, which is equivalent to the drinking water consumption of a small city with a population of 20,000 people.
The study stated: “In areas already suffering from drought, these facilities can cause severe groundwater depletion, conflicts over water distribution, with increasing burdens on residents of affected municipalities, as well as damage to the local ecosystem.”
The study also contradicts one of the main arguments made by data center operators, which is that reducing electricity consumption to very low levels necessarily requires increasing water use. The study indicated that it is not possible to prove a statistical relationship between electricity consumption efficiency and water consumption efficiency in practice.
Clear messages!
The study added that achieving high energy efficiency is also possible without relying at all on water cooling, as through the thoughtful use of modern dry cooling or pressure cooling techniques, direct water consumption in server centers can be reduced to completely zero.
At the same time, Greenpeace criticized the presence of a major transparency problem, noting that less than half of the data center operators, numbering about 1,200 operators, submitted their data to the authorities, while there were only 139 usable reports.
The organization called on the German government to oblige operators to conduct studies to assess water needs before granting licenses, ban the establishment of water-intensive facilities in dry areas, and impose strict penalties on violators of the data reporting obligation imposed by the authorities.
