A few months ago, at a family wedding in Nashik, an uncle I hadn’t seen in years cornered me near the buffet table, a plate of jalebi balanced precariously in one hand. He knew I’d spent decades in technology, and he’d recently read something on WhatsApp about a data centre somewhere in the US that was supposedly drinking a small town dry. “Sandeep,” he said, half joking and half not, “you people are building these things everywhere now. Are we going to run out of water because of the internet?” An aunt nearby, who runs a small farm and knows exactly what a dry borewell costs a family, wasn’t joking at all.I’ve been asked some version of that question more times than I can count. It has the shape of a good story — a shiny new building nobody’s allowed inside, and a resource every one of us understands instinctively matters more than almost anything else. Water is personal in a way megawatts and fibre routes will never be. So when someone says a data centre “drinks” water, it doesn’t need evidence to feel true.
But having spent the better part of four decades inside this industry — and now running my own advisory practice — I want to walk you through what’s actually happening on the ground. Not to defend the industry blindly. But to separate what is genuinely a concern from what has become a kind of digital-age folklore.
Where the fear actually comes from
The panic has a real origin. A handful of data centres — mostly older ones, built fifteen or twenty years ago in water-stressed parts of the world, using older-generation evaporative cooling towers — genuinely did draw meaningful volumes of municipal water. There were well-documented cases in the US where local communities pushed back, and rightly so. Those stories were true, and they deserved the scrutiny they got.
The trouble is what happened next. Those stories — from a specific place, a specific decade, a specific ageing technology — got flattened into a single sweeping sentence: “data centres use too much water.” That’s simply not how the industry has evolved, particularly not in India or the Gulf, where water has always been expensive and scarce enough that nobody sane designs a facility assuming it will be freely available.
What’s actually inside the building today
When I walk a client through a modern hyperscale campus design, water is one of the first constraints we model, not an afterthought. The industry has moved decisively toward closed-loop cooling, where the same water circulates for years through a sealed system, topped up only to replace evaporation loss, rather than being continuously drawn fresh. Many of the large campuses now coming up in India are designing around treated wastewater and recycled water for cooling, not potable municipal supply at all — because any developer who has been through an approval process here knows a water-stressed community will simply not permit a facility that threatens its supply.
The comparison nobody makes
A modern hyperscale data centre, cooled efficiently, typically uses water in the same rough order of magnitude, annually, as a single large golf course or a mid-sized textile dyeing unit. Not a fraction of it, not ten times more — roughly comparable. Agriculture, for context, accounts for somewhere around four-fifths of all the water India uses in a year.
A golf course doesn’t trend on social media. A data centre does — not because it uses more water, but because it’s unfamiliar, and easy to imagine as an invisible machine swallowing something precious.
What responsible actually looks like
None of this means the industry gets a free pass. There are developers, particularly newer entrants chasing speed over diligence, who haven’t done adequate water impact studies before breaking ground. There are regions — parts of the Deccan plateau, certain stretches of Rajasthan — where I have personally advised clients against a site because the local water table simply couldn’t support it responsibly, whatever clever workaround was proposed. Good siting discipline means walking away from land that fails the water test on the ground.
There’s a second risk worth naming honestly: a single facility can be water-neutral on its own numbers, but when four or five such campuses cluster along the same river basin — which is exactly what’s happening in some of India’s fastest-growing data centre corridors — the cumulative draw is a different question from any single project’s clearance. Most approvals in India are assessed project by project, not at the basin level. That’s a real gap, and it’s exactly what a community or regulator should be asking about before the fifth facility is approved in the same district.
Myth vs. Reality — A Quick Reference
| The Myth | The Reality |
| Data centres are draining rivers and reservoirs dry. | Modern hyperscale facilities use closed-loop cooling — the same water recirculates for years, topped up only for evaporation loss. |
| Every data centre uses the same amount of water. | Water use depends entirely on cooling technology; older evaporative towers use far more than modern air-cooled or liquid-to-chip systems. |
| Operators use municipal drinking water freely. | Many new Indian campuses are designed around treated wastewater and recycled water, not potable supply. |
| Communities have no say in this. | Water-stressed communities can and do block approvals; sourcing plans are negotiated as seriously as power contracts. |
What I’d ask anyone forming a view to do is swap one question for a better one. Instead of “how much water does a data centre use,” ask “what cooling technology is this facility using, and where is its water coming from” — and whether that facility’s actual annual consumption is a public document anyone can request, not just a number in the company’s own sustainability report. That’s the conversation communities and regulators should be having, loudly and often, and it shouldn’t depend on residents trusting a company’s self-reporting.
My uncle’s question at that wedding wasn’t wrong to ask. It just needed more context than a WhatsApp forward gives anyone. That’s the gap this series is meant to close.
In the next piece, I want to take on the second most common fear I hear — that data centres are quietly bleeding our power grids dry while promising renewable energy they never quite deliver.
(Views are personal)
