Britain wants to triple its data center capacity by 2030. The trade body for the country’s water companies has told ministers there is not enough water to run them.
Water UK, which represents England’s water suppliers, told MPs this week that the government’s growth agenda is not about what these machines will drink.
Data centers do not exist in frameworks that feed England’s water, such as tent projects. Stargate UK costs are rising and newer sites are being launched network delays from themselves.
Numbers are low today, sharp tomorrow. They use about data centers in England 6.6 million liters It consumes drinking water per day and Water UK expects this to reach 19.8 million liters if it triples capacity as planned.
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Individual sites are already asking for more than their neighbors: some proposed centers in the Affinity Water region have called for up to 3 million liters per day, the daily consumption of about 3,500 homes.
Tension is concentrated instead of diffused. Around 125 data centers are proposed or under construction in Affinity Water’s area, which covers Slough and its busy server rooms alone, and more than three-quarters of the UK’s data centers are located in the water-congested south and east of England.
The same corner of the country already draws about 220 million liters more water a day than water companies predicted before most of the pipeline was built. In some areas, the gap between what suppliers can deliver and what customers already use has narrowed to around 2%.
Because ministers have designated data centers as critical national infrastructure, water companies say they have little power to turn off the taps when supplies are tight.
During the pipe bans that spread across the south and east this summer, restrictions fell on households, not data centers that use potable-quality supplies under existing regulations.
Water UK’s central complaint is that none of this has been taken into account. The data centers are excluded from the Environmental Protection Agency’s national water resources framework, and the agency told MPs that the government’s AI growth zone policy does not mention water at all.
“There is an assumption that the country will always have enough water for its economic needs” his briefing says. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
David Henderson, chief executive of Water UK, blamed the problem on a planning bottleneck rather than a lack of rainfall.
“We are desperate to provide enough water for new housing” said “But it is held back by a regulatory system that makes building new reservoirs slower than it should be.”
According to the agency’s own figures, the current supply can only serve 420,000 of the 1.5 million homes the government wants to build.
The backdrop is the widening gap between what England has and what it needs.
A House of Lords report in May predicted a shortfall of about 5 billion liters a day of public water without intervention by mid-century, although about 60% of this could be covered by leak repairs and lower demand.
These projections don’t fully account for data center growth, a precision that Water UK tries to force onto the page.
Water UK wants the data center requirement written into national planning assumptions and faster approval of reservoirs and other large water projects.
The industry is also based on closed-loop and air-based engineering cooling systems Far fewer and a handful of operators are trying to use vaporizer methods recycle waste heat instead of pouring.
The government has earmarked nine new reservoirs and says its AI development zones sit where energy and water are available.
A national policy statement intended to set the terms for this expansion was due in February and has yet to appear. Until it does, the country commits to data centers before determining where the water will come from.
