Sydney Water is preparing for data centres to consume 25% of Sydney’s water by 2035.
No data centre operating in Australia is required to disclose how much water it consumes, nor is there a law currently requiring any of them to recycle it. And even if they do, the cooling process generates toxins hard to get rid of.
The water that passes through data centre cooling systems does not come out the same as it went in. Biocides, heavy metals, corrosion inhibitors and PFAS — forever chemicals that do not break down in the environment — accumulate in cooling water and are discharged into municipal water systems. Once in the supply, those chemicals cannot be removed by standard treatment.
This is already an issue in the US.
The peak industry body, Data Centre Australia, confirmed this year that questions about chemical waste from its members’ facilities were the first it had received on the subject. When those facilities eventually decommission their hardware, the environmental and financial cost of safe disposal will fall somewhere — on industry, on government, or on the public.
No Australian government has said which.
https://michaelwest.com.au/waste-tsunami-water-and-the-hidden-cost-of-ai-data-centres/
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Let’s be clear here: Australia does not at present have any AI data centres. All the data centres and their woes as described in the article are in other countries. This is not happening here.
No data centre operating in Australia is required to disclose how much water it consumes, nor is there a law currently requiring any of them to recycle it. And even if they do, the cooling process generates toxins hard to get rid of.
You could say this of any business. It’s a nothing-burger. There are dozens of data centres in Australia providing regular hosting to all sorts of companies, and articles like this never really talk about how good normal data centres are. I worry that all these fearmongering articles are going to taint all data centres with the same brush as AI data centres. There genuinely are valid concerns to raise and discuss. But these articles only talk about the worst-case impact, never educating people about potential steps to mitigate those concerns before they happen here.
There are solutions to the power and water issues. They are complicated, though. These things can be largely sustainable, though it is a lot more expensive to build them that way. Will they be built with sustainable infrastructure attached? Who can say. Proposals for this have been raised and ministers even agree it’s a good idea.
Will Australia get AI data centres? Yes, we’ll probably end up getting a few in the next decade or so.
Will these issues matter as they are constructed? Yes.
Do they have to use so much water? Actually no. The water used for cooling does not need to be drinking water. A private dam that cycles water around the data centre is a possible solution to drastically reduce water requirements as the water is used over and over.
What about power? This is a true concern. AI data centres use crazy amounts of power. As much as a medium sized town.Ideally, any Data centres with these requirements will also be placed away from suburbia, and be mostly self-sufficient with their power and water requirements. We have the space and the technology. It is yet to be determined whether we have the will to force them to be built this way. Their owners are not going to want to do it, they will need to be compelled.
This is likely fake news and doesn’t use public information.
This doesn’t contain numbers: https://datacenter.uptimeinstitute.com/rs/711-RIA-145/images/2025.Annual.Survey.Report.pdf?version=0 doesn’t contain numbers regarding water use.
The 2026 report isn’t available to the public yet. https://uptimeinstitute.com/resources/research-and-reports/uptime-institute-global-data-center-survey-results-2026
Water use of Datacenters for evaporative cooling, cooling loops and reservoir heat exchange may be lumped in together. These used have wildly different characteristics and implications.
This infographic seems wrong to the point of lying.
There are not 250 large data centres, I have no doubt there are 250 DC around Australia, I doubt all 250 use the amount of water this infographic claims.
Was this infographic not meant to be read in the context of forecasting? The article states that this story is based upon Sydney’s water authority planning, I didn’t read it as current figures? Seems more pressing to me to be planning for the future, not waiting till it arrives then trying to mitigate the world of problems we are in.
