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The Water Footprint of Artificial Intelligence: Data Center Expansion and Freshwater Sustainability
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Agrawal, Pratibha, and Akanksha Yadav. 2026. “The Water Footprint of Artificial Intelligence: Data Center Expansion and Freshwater Sustainability.” In Advances in Computational Intelligence and Robotics, edited by Hitesh Mohapatra, Amiya Kumar Rath, Fadi Al-Turjman, and Manjur Kolhar. IGI Global Scientific Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-2600-2761-5.ch004
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is rapidly growing, which has triggered a dramatic increase in the size of data centers around the world, attracting serious environmental issues. The chapter discusses the outcomes of this growth on the sustainability of freshwater, particularly the data center water-intensive operations. It relies on the available literature, on the basis of the available empirical data and assesses the trends in the data center proliferation, regional differences in the water consumption, and on their direct and indirect effects in regard to the freshwater resources. The paper also examines the impact of climatic, economic, and policy dynamics on water consumption, which increases pressure in susceptible areas. It suggests sustainable cooling technologies, governance systems, and corporate water stewardship as those areas of mitigation and presents the gaps in the existing literature and points to the necessity of integrated water resource governance in accordance with digital development.
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