A new report from the United Nations University says data centers used water equivalent to the annual basic needs of more than 600 million people in 2025. DR covered the findings on August 7, 2026.
The report examines the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence and the data centers that support it. According to DR, the researchers argue that the public has largely overlooked these costs. DR notes that the report has just been published and is now being picked up by other outlets.
The report states that AI accounted for about 20 percent of total electricity use in data centers in 2025. That share is expected to rise to 40 percent by 2030. Data center electricity use in 2025 was linked to 4.5 trillion liters of water, enough to fill 1.8 million Olympic swimming pools.
DR puts the same volume in another way. It matches the annual basic household water needs of more than 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. If all the world’s data centers were a single country, DR reports, they would rank 11th globally for electricity consumption.
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Danish researcher points to water-stressed regions
Raghavendra Selvan, an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, researches AI’s environmental impact. He told DR that new data centers in Indian cities are draining local water supplies that are already under pressure. He named Bengaluru in the state of Karnataka as one example.
Per Selvan, the problem is not limited to India. He pointed to Chile and the United States, where communities also face water scarcity. He said the situation will worsen without intervention, and that companies will keep building where water is cheap or groundwater can be pumped.
Selvan explained that the cheapest cooling method is evaporative cooling, which runs fresh water through pipes and lets it evaporate. Closed-loop systems do not waste water but cost more to install. He argued that all new data centers should be required to use closed-loop cooling.
Selvan also said the full picture is hard to obtain. Most leading AI is developed by private companies that do not publish this information. He described a high degree of opacity and said the total environmental impact is drastically underestimated.
He added that responsibility rests with the companies building the tools, not with individual users. Much of the public debate focuses on user behavior, such as the length of a prompt, which he disagrees with.
Videnskab.dk reported that data centers now use as much electricity as France, and linked the report’s water warning to a scenario where they could exceed the water use of all of Africa. Politiken framed the findings as a warning about a regulatory dilemma.
Kaveh Madani, one of the lead researchers behind the report, said it is not an attack on AI. He called AI a transformation that improves life for billions of people. As stated by Madani, the report is a call to use it responsibly and to address unintended consequences proactively. Concerns about water resources have also shaped Danish policy, including the decision to ban PFAS pesticides to protect groundwater.
