This article is part of a series looking at the risks to the UK’s water security which are being amplified by our current Labour government. You can read the first article in the AI data centres Water Crisis series here.
A report from a government advisory body has detailed the growing threat that AI companies pose to clean drinking water in the UK. And believe it or not, the issue is actually worse than it sounds. The government isn’t just greenlighting water-guzzling data centres; it’s greenlighting them in areas which face the most severe water scarcity. And why are they expanding so aggressively, you ask?
As of right now, it’s seemingly to meet the growing demand for pointless slop like this:
My favorite trend in the Sora app is these body cam footage videos
This clip with Spongebob hit 1M+ TikTok views!
I built a workflow to remove the Sora 2 watermarks
pic.twitter.com/9eI7kjAkKC
— Miguel | AP (@angrypenguinPNG) October 3, 2025
So much for the grownups being back in the room.
Britain isn’t drinking – but AI data centres will
The Government Digital Sustainability Alliance (GDSA) was established to provide guidance on how we can achieve “digital transformation” without putting sustainability targets at risk. In aid of this, they published a report titled Water use in AI… Data Centres.
As the GDSA summarised, only 0.5% of water on the Earth’s surface is available freshwater. Given how much it rains in the UK, you’d think we’d be better placed than most to ensure adequate water supplies. You’d think wrong, of course – chiefly because decades of failed privatisation have lain waste to our water infrastructure (more on how thathere).
The GDSA highlight that we’re already expecting a “daily water deficit of nearly 5 billion litres by 2050”. This is over a third of the “current public water supply”. Even more alarming is the fact that these estimates don’t account for all the water that data centres are guzzling, because the government hasn’t bothered to factor that in. In fact, these companies don’t even need to monitor or report on how much water they use.
Noting the uneven nature of this problem, the GDSA highlight:
This impending water deficit is not uniform across the country. Some regions are projected to experience less future rainfall, possess smaller water storage capacities, and face larger population or resource demands, leading to localised areas of acute water stress. For instance, water-poor regions such as Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk are already experiencing the impact, with housing and business growth being constrained by water supply availability and inadequate or ageing water infrastructure.
Water stressed regions
The GDSA highlight that multiple regions in the UK are classified “seriously water stressed”. The list of private water companies which allowed this to happen includes Thames Water, with the GDSA highlighting that:
the first government-designated “AI Growth Zone” in Culham, Oxfordshire, is situated just seven miles from the site of a planned new reservoir at Abingdon, intended to supply customers in the Thames Valley, London, and Hampshire. Thames Water, the utility responsible for this area, is itself classified as seriously water stressed.
For decades, we allowed private companies to get away with profiting from water networks even as they brazenly failed to maintain them. Now, just as they’re being forced to do the absolute bare minimum, the government is allowing a different set of private companies to set us back even further.
England’s reservoirs at lowest level for a decade, experts call for hosepipe bans.
No new reservoirs built since 1989. Over a trillion litres a year lost to leaks.
Water companies paid out £85bn in dividends. No regulator/Govt had a national plan.https://t.co/P86HGHO05j
— Prem Sikka (@premnsikka) July 12, 2025
In response to the BBC, a government spokesperson said in February that they ‘recognise’ AI data centres:
face sustainability challenges such as energy demands and water use – that’s why AI Growth Zones are designed to attract investment in areas where existing energy and water infrastructure is already in place.
The GDSA took issue with this, stating:
this stance appears to be more aspirational or reactive rather than a proactive, mandated policy.
We’re going to take issue with the GDSA report here, because the government’s stance arguably isn’t even “reactive”. On 16 September, they announced a new Google data centre in Waltham Cross. Thames Water provide water to Waltham Cross, and as noted, this frequent offender is on the list of seriously water stressed regions.
This suggests one of two things:
- There’s no communication between government departments.
- Starmer decided he doesn’t give a damn about the UK’s water needs some time between February and September.
Supporting the latter, it was between February and September that it became widely agreed that Starmer can’t survive past the 2026 local elections:
Basically the trend of the last 50 years is that if your approval rating is less than -10 after your first year, you are completely cooked.
May (-17) resigned, Sunak (-29) lost, Brown (-53) lost.
The outcome of Starmer’s leadership (-43) is TBD.
— Stats for Lefties
(@LeftieStats) September 12, 2025
The biggest catastrophe for Starmer was the local election kicking in May:
I’m really surprised how little attention Labour’s shattering defeat has received. This is the sort of result you expect after 10 **years** in government, not 10 months. Indeed the last time Labour suffered anything remotely like this was in 2009 (-62%) after 12 years in office!
— Stats for Lefties
We’re not saying that Starmer has sold Britain out to curry favour with potential employers, but we are saying his actions can’t be explained by ignorance or incompetence. It’s on the record that his government understands the “sustainability challenges”; Starmer has simply chosen to ignore them.
“Conflict”
The GDSA predict that the rise of AI data centres in seriously water stressed areas will lead to ‘predictable conflict hotspots’. They add:
The siting of water-intensive infrastructure in already water-stressed areas, particularly those with existing socio-economic vulnerabilities, raises significant environmental justice concerns. This practice could disproportionately impact local communities, potentially leading to increased water bills, rationing, or reduced environmental flows, thereby transforming a technical water management issue into a matter of social equity.
Things could get worse too. If a new proposal goes through, AI data centres will be considered Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP), allowing developers to seek planning permission directly from the government. This would “bypass normal local authority planning“, and put more power in the hands of a national government which has demonstrated it will put the business interests of US AI barons over the resource needs of British citizens.
As of right now, the key benefit to ‘hyperscaling’ AI capacity is to generate dross like this:
AI Spongebob Is Just The Beginning
Sora 2 is trash and nobody should be a fan of ithttps://t.co/iHRLG4rLev pic.twitter.com/QmShIdrVZd— DimmyM7 (@DimmyM7) October 3, 2025
The above is taken from OpenAI’s Sora 2 which allows users to generate videos with audio. We have no idea how much water is used to generate a video like this, but we do know that generating text could use as much a 0.25ml of water per prompt. Video and audio are significantly more resource intensive than text, and on top of this people are generating multiple videos every time, because most fail to match what the user had in mind.
Even if you believe these companies can give birth to an all-knowing AI super being which will solve the world’s problems, you have to acknowledge they’re currently squandering processing power at the expense of local communities.
AI data centres vs “social well-being”
The GDSA summarise the threat to UK society as follows:
AI’s water footprint adds another layer of complexity to an already multi-faceted policy challenge, demonstrating that water is not merely an environmental concern but a fundamental constraint on economic development and social well-being.
Starmer ran on a platform of ‘growth, growth, growth’, and he repeated that mantra so much it became farcical. It seems far more ridiculous now, of course, given that his own advisors have said his agenda risks a “fundamental constraint on economic development”.
This is what Starmer said a week after the announcement of yet more AI data centres:
My government has given the go ahead for a record number of major infrastructure projects — creating thousands of jobs and driving growth across the country.
I promised we would get Britain building.
That’s exactly what we’re doing.
— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) September 23, 2025
Specifically, the growth he’s driving is a growing burden on the UK’s most at-risk areas.
If the AI companies succeed in creating an all-thinking machine, the ‘benefits’ they predict are as follows:
The CEO of Anthropic (a powerful AI company) predicts that AI could wipe out HALF of entry-level white collar jobs in the next 5 years.
We must demand that increased worker productivity from AI benefits working people, not just wealthy stockholders on Wall St. AI IS A BIG DEAL.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 5, 2025
Starmer has some serious questions to answer on what happens if these companies get what they want with AI data centres. Because right now, it’s hard to see how any of this will benefit British citizens.
Featured image via the Canary
By Willem Moore
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