Introduction
Human civilization has come a long way throughout the centuries. Humanity has achieved unprecedented infrastructural and technological progress but every step demanded some resources. The Industrial Revolution relied heavily on wood and coal, Urbanisation relied on land and biodiversity, the revolution of the Internet relied on electricity and semiconductors and now the AI revolution relies on Data. But there’s also another resource getting depleted silently, that is the fresh water.
Understanding Global Water Bankruptcy
Over the last couple of decades, the world was facing an escalating “Global Water Crises”. The word crises here signified that there existed some exceptional conditions like drought or flood etc. due to which the situation has departed from the normal conditions for the worse. And if these situations are dealt with, then things would again become normal.
But now in many places of the world this assumption is no longer working. Instead of the chronic overuse we have reached the point where the world may no longer return to the desirable “normal”. The UNU-INWEH Report 2026 warns that the world has already moved to a new phase. The report called this new phase “Global Water Bankruptcy”.
The notion of Water Bankruptcy is similar to financial bankruptcy. It means that nature provides income to the ecosystem in the form of rain, snow, glacier and groundwater but the world is spending more than it receives. We are consuming water faster than the time it takes to replenish.
Why is India more vulnerable to this Water Bankruptcy?
According to the report of the World Bank, India has 18% of the world’s population while having only 4% of the global fresh water resources. Groundwater fulfills nearly two-thirds of the demand of water for agriculture and drinking water. With the depleting ground water level and climate change causing inconsistent monsoon, India is placed among the most water stressed countries in the world.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD)’s first long-range forecast for the 2026 southwest monsoon puts rainfall at 92 per cent of the long-period average, the lowest opening forecast in 25 years. This is no longer a water scarcity in various regions, it is approaching the phase of water bankruptcy in India.
AI’s hidden Water Footprint
Most people believe AI consumes and requires only electricity. But the Data Centers that store and process the data for AI to word requires huge amounts of water to cool down the towers and prevent them from overheating.
The Data Centers in India and many other high-temperature regions use the Evaporative Cooling Technology to prevent overheating. In this method, the water removes heat from the servers to cool it down and around 80% of the water gets evaporated. Karnataka’s IT Minister Priyank Kharge told the state assembly in March 2026 that each Megawatt of a Data Center requires 25 million liters of water annually. And by the end of 2025, the data center capacity of India reached 1.5 Gigawatt which means 37.5 billion liters of water is currently being consumed annually just from these Data Centers. The union government plans to increase the capacity by six-folds which can take the annual water consumption to around 300 billion liters of water by 2030.
Data centers are expanding fast in semi-urban areas where the majority of the population still depends on ground water for agriculture. The experts believe that if dependency on fresh water is not resolved, this scarcity could potentially hit the entire industry in the long run. “Imagine shutdowns of data centres in peak summer due to lack of water for cooling – how might this impact banking services, medical systems in hospitals using cloud services, transit system operations and more,” says Ms Goswami from WRI India.
On one hand we’re working on increasing the use of renewable energy to reduce carbon footprint, on the other hand we’re using billions of liters of fresh water which is worsening the already existing water bankruptcy. There is a need to find a better alternative than the evaporative cooling method. As in the end we need to ensure that one good is not sacrificed for another.
Do we have better alternatives?
Most of the Data Centers take water from Municipal supplies and if consumed too much may cause water shortage for homes and may even result in increase in water costs. Although there are many alternatives for data centers to cool their towers and servers, they may or may not work in every region or environment. Some viable options for India can be:
1. Water from rivers and lakes:
Instead of taking treated water from municipalities, the data centers may directly obtain the water from rivers or lakes. For this, the data center has to be near a large water body and have to set-up some filtration units to remove debris and sediments from the water.
2. Seawater:
Recently Google has adopted the practice of using seawater to cool their servers in some of their facilities. For this, the water needs to be distilled or it may corrode the server. Some companies are even experimenting by submerging their entire data center in seawater.
3. Single Phase Immersion Cooling:
In this cooling method no water is used, rather the IT equipment gets submerged in a non-conductive liquid that absorbs and dissipates heat. This is considered to be an environmentally friendly method than most other methods, though the initial investment for this system can be quite high.
4. Direct-to-chip cooling:
D2C method directly targets the source of heat for efficient dissipation. In this method, the chilled liquid is circulated through pipes near the heat generating components. This makes it energy efficient.
Conclusion
Every technological revolution in the history of mankind has been judged not only by what it created, but also by what it consumed. As India races to become a global AI powerhouse, the challenge is no longer whether we can build more data centers, but whether we can do so without exhausting the very resource that sustains every citizen and entire ecosystem. In the age of artificial intelligence, perhaps the most valuable resource is not computing power, it is something critical yet close enough to often get overlooked, it is freshwater.
