Investors are demanding more details about the environmental impact of data centers following multiple scrapped projects. A new report from Reuters (via Tom’s Hardware) states that investors are now pressuring Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to release more data on the power and water consumption of data centers as a growing list of communities express opposition to building or expanding. According to a report by research firm Mordor Intelligence (c’mon folks, enough with the LOTR references in tech already, Palantir anyone?), data centers in North America used upwards of 1 trillion gallons of water in 2025, and this is before many other planned projects have even finished construction.
Boston-based investment firm Trillium Asset Management, which has more than $4 billion in asset management, is putting the thumbscrews to Google parent company Alphabet, asking for more clarity to meet its climate goals. Trillium said the investors feel they’ve been left in the dark while emissions have risen by 51% despite a goal to be carbon-free by 2030 and a previous goal to halve its emissions by 2020. Meanwhile, another report has calculated that using OpenAI’s GPT-4 to produce ~100 words of content can consume as much as three bottles of water, and that AI data centers consumed more water in a year than the worldwide human population drank in bottled form. The scariest parts of these figures is that they could be considered conservative estimates as tech firms are not fully disclosing usage numbers in a clear and meaningful way to the public, as stated by Alex De Vries-Gao of the VU Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies, who said the following to The Verge.
“There’s no way to put an extremely accurate number on this, but it’s going to be really big regardless, in the end, everyone is paying the price for this.”
– Alex De Vries-Gao
Professor Shaolei Ren of the University of California also agrees with De Vries Gao’s report and that the actual numbers of energy and water consumption could be much higher, but more studies are needed.