Britain does not have enough water for more data centres amid 'fatally flawed' AI growth plans

Britain does not have enough water for more data centres, the UK's water companies have said, in a damning indictment of Labour's AI growth plans.

Water UK has told MPs that the Government fails to make 'a single mention of water' in any of its major AI strategies, and that Environment Agency forecasts on water use were 'fatally flawed' because they did not factor in data centre use.

It has warned that the current infrastructure is not prepared for the demands of data centres, which it has accused of favouring cheaper and wasteful 'open loop' cooling to keep equipment from overheating, often evaporating water through cooling towers.

If controls aren't brought in on how they use water such as mandating 'closed loop' reuse systems, 'all customers' are at risk of losing their supply during peak periods of demand in future summers, it said.

The umbrella group wrote in a submission to the Environmental Audit Committee: 'There appears to be an assumption that the country will always have enough water for its economic needs. Nothing could be further from the truth.'

Musician and environment campaigner Feargal Sharkey has called on the new Government to appoint a Minister for Water Strategy to force data centres to use less resources, warning that areas will 'run out of water'. 

The Government says data centres will be factored into long-term planning by the Environment Agency - but stresses that water firms must take responsibility to plan for the future.

Data centres rely on water to cool down the reams of powerful computers inside, which run all kinds of digital services from web hosting to film streaming, as well as AI services such as ChatGPT.

The vast majority of the UK's 520 facilities are based in the South-East, particularly in and around Greater London - critical for financial institutions in the City who rely on 'low latency' internet connections to make rapid trades and other transactions.

But plans are afoot to build data centres in more rural areas such as Devon and East Anglia, despite the fact the latter gets less rainfall than any other part of the UK and already faces huge demand for water.

These are facing growing - and high-profile - opposition as people pay more attention to the environmental impact of artificial intelligence (AI): presenter Jake Humphrey has spoken out against a planned facility in a former poppy field near Norwich.

The Government wants to triple data centre capacity by 2030 and has designated them as critical national infrastructure, which could mean they are prioritised for water usage - putting Britain on a trajectory that could lead to an all-out water crisis.

Nine new reservoirs are being built, though Water UK says these can take up to 15 years to complete - and are unlikely to meet the additional demand for data centres because of the flawed forecasts.

'Due to excessive planning and environmental restrictions, they will take years longer to build than they should,' it said.

'As such, it could well be too late to provide the "headroom" we need if forecasts are wrong - which they almost certainly are.'

In the meantime, the pressures that should be on data centres are still being passed onto ordinary people.

Some 23 million across South and Eastern England are currently under a hosepipe ban and the threat of a £1,000 fine if they dare to water their plants.

Homeowners are also being urged to do their bit via the nationwide £75million Let's Save Water campaign, which tells Brits to cut showers short and fix leaky taps.

Oliver Hayes, head of policy at climate action group Global Action plan, said it was 'galling' to see households being asked to cut back, with seeming impunity for data centres.

'The water industry couldn’t be clearer: officials simply aren’t planning for the massive drain on water caused by the data centre gold rush,' he said. 

'And when the water crisis is already so acute that cancer hospitals can’t be built, prioritising these AI slop farms over people’s real needs is grotesque.

'Cities all over the world are waking up to the data centre reality, and if Andy Burnham’s government is serious about putting people first, they must follow suit and announce a moratorium on new data centres until water use and other critical concerns can be sensibly addressed.'

Let's Save Water says its suggestions could save 28 litres a day per person.

But the most intensive data centres are thought to chug a bewildering 35 litres every second, equivalent to three million litres a day and the same level of demand as 3,500 homes at peak times. 

Water firms are also continuing to leak 2.87bn litres of water each day - five times the amount being saved by the hosepipe ban - following years of infrastructural negligence. Water UK insists leaks are down 40 per cent from the mid-1990s peak.

Feargal Sharkey, who campaigns to demand accountability from water firms, told the Mail that consumers should not be shouldering the demands of data centres refusing to do their bit. 

'The water industry is very good at trying to deflect attention away from itself. For 30 years they've run the system into the ground,' the former Undertones frontman said. 

'The government wants to boost economic growth with AI but due to nearly 40 years of incompetence we simply don't have the water. The big plan to compete with the Chinese and the Americans has gone down the plughole.'

Mr Sharkey added that plans to build data centres in Norfolk 'made me laugh… East Anglia is the driest area of the UK. There's more rain in South Sudan.'

He continued: 'We need to find another five billion litres of water in the next 20-25 years and the system is creaking around the edges.

'It's an affront to customers that they leak so much while telling people they can't water their flowers, and don't you dare turn on your sprinkler.

'Andy Burnham should appoint a Minister for Water Security who has absolute power to tell everybody to get their act together. 

'Otherwise London is going to run out of water and they won't have any data centres at all.'

Water UK's warning comes after Affinity Water, which supplies data centre hub Slough, said earlier this year that one data centre proposed in its region wanted to use 21million litres of water a day, equivalent to the needs of 147,000 people.

'The planning framework is built around household growth and per-capita consumption and has not adapted to commercial users whose water needs can match those of a market town,' it said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said: 'The environment and sustainable development must go hand-in-hand and we will protect our water supply while unlocking growth, including looking at alternatives or ways to minimise impact on supplies and output of wastewater from data centres.

'We are also taking decisive measures to secure water supplies and meet higher demand, including record levels of infrastructure investment and building nine new reservoirs.'

It comes as ChatGPT firm OpenAI admitted that one of its models went rogue and hacked into the website of an artificial intelligence start-up.

Bosses said the autonomous agent, which is an AI system that operates alone following human instruction, was being tested in a controlled environment.

But it found vulnerabilities and managed to escape containment before reaching the internet and breaking into Hugging Face, a major hub for sharing AI models.

The agent gained access to some internal company systems and compromised the hub's infrastructure, in what OpenAI described as an 'unprecedented' incident.