AI’s Silent Consumption: Is India Heading Toward A Water Emergency?in Environmental Protectionby Arunabha Bhattacharyya01/04/2026Photo credit ...

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AI’s Silent Consumption: Is India Heading Toward A Water Emergency?in Environmental Protectionby Arunabha Bhattacharyya01/04/2026Photo credit ...
AI’s Silent Consumption: Is India Heading Toward A Water Emergency?
in Environmental Protection
by Arunabha Bhattacharyya
01/04/2026

Photo credit foodandwaterwatch.org
Suppose, you wake up , go for brush , open the water tap and you found there is not a single drop of water. But in your area there is a data centre and it needs 24 X 7 fresh water , and this is just for your question drops on chat gpt or image generate request on Gemini. Sounds odd ?

Just an example , In Thakurpada , Mumbai area drinking water comes every other day , people of the area say “When it comes, we need to drop whatever we are doing“. Residents of the area are either factory workers or daily edge earners , every day they are fighting against water shortage. And yes, data centers near their area have access to 24 X 7 water.

A village in Uttar Pradesh name as Tusiana, residents of around 2000 people. 2022, Ministry of Electronics and IT has opened data center named as Yotta data center. Advertised as “North India’s Gateway of Digital world. The resident has been told they will benefit from them.

But after construction is complete , “They will not need for workers“—local daily workers. Residents of the village expressed their anxiety on future of water availability. DTE’s ground level reporting told that some residents saw deep borewells being drilled around 200 feet down to reach out groundwater.

Every time we are searching something in google , storing photos , saving notes , joining online meeting or generating codes , photos or texts using AI chatbot. And everything relied on data center.

A data center is like a house of IT infrastructure like sever , switches , storage system , routers for storing and distributing data . A data center works high performance computing tasks , quick data analysis and that’s why it need multiple CPU , GPU and memory chips as the part of server.

Electricity used for run servers and it create heat. Which maybe slowdown the work or catastrophic failures can disrupts online works like banking, education, office work and also digital payment. That’s why it need water for cooling the server , the process actually call evaporative cooling .

But why fresh water? because saltwater creates corrosion in pipes and equipment. Impurities can lead to scaling and damage. That’s why clean fresh water is needed , fresh water is circulated and allowed to evaporate. Evaporation removes heat from the server.

Now let’s talk about the amount of fresh water need for cooling the server. From University of California , researchers found that if you generate a 100 words of text by any AI’s chatbot , the cooling systems consume up to 500ml or more of water, it also vary local condition like temperature.

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