German Data Centres Could Double Water Use to 27 Billion Litres by 2030, Study Says

The projected 2030 figure is roughly what a city of about 580,000 people uses in drinking water, the study said. Today's annual volume equals the entire contents of Berlin's Wannsee lake.

The findings put environmental groups at odds with the digital industry over a cost of data centres that has drawn less attention in Europe than electricity. Germany's IT industry association Bitkom recently said water demand from data centres was largely unproblematic, noting that nearly two-thirds of facilities in the country use at most 0.1 litre of water per kilowatt-hour of IT electricity and that significant consumption is mostly limited to sites with evaporative cooling.

The Öko-Institut reached a very different number. After removing faulty records from the government's data centre register, it calculated a weighted average of 0.67 litres per kilowatt-hour of IT electricity. Taz reported that Bitkom attributed the gap partly to different methods and underlying data.

The study estimated that a single 100-megawatt data centre needs 200 million to 930 million litres of water a year, depending on its cooling technology. The upper figure matches the drinking water use of a town of up to 20,000 people, according to ZDF's report on the study, which warned that such sites can cause acute groundwater stress in regions that are already dry.

Greenpeace also pointed to gaps in the official data. Fewer than half of the roughly 1,200 operators required to report supplied figures, and only 139 of the reports were usable, the group said.

It is calling for mandatory assessments of water impact before permits are granted, a ban on water-intensive facilities in drought-prone areas, and consistent penalties for operators that break reporting rules.

The study lands during two days of coordinated protests against data centres across 13 European countries, and as Germany works on a national data centre strategy that is meant to attract more AI computing capacity.