German Study Warns: AI Data Centers Could Double Water Use to 27 Billion Liters by 2030

A new study published by the Freiburg-based Öko-Institut, commissioned by Greenpeace, warns that the expansion of data centers driven by the AI boom threatens to severely strain regional water supplies in Germany. The research indicates that German server farms consumed approximately 13 billion liters of water for cooling in 2025. By 2030, this demand could more than double to up to 27 billion liters per year due to new mega-data centers, a volume equivalent to the annual drinking water consumption of a city with around 580,000 inhabitants, such as Essen.

These calculations stand in stark contrast to the position taken by the digital industry association Bitkom, which recently classified water usage as largely unproblematic. Bitkom stated that nearly two-thirds of local facilities consume a maximum of 0.1 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of connected power, arguing that relevant consumption is limited mainly to evaporative cooling. However, after correcting erroneous datasets from the official government data center register, the Öko-Institut arrived at a weighted average of 0.67 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of IT electricity consumption. The current annual usage of 13 billion liters already corresponds roughly to the total water content of Berlin's Wannsee lake.

The study highlights particular risks posed by planned large-scale projects. Currently, nearly 30 data centers with connection capacities ranging from 100 megawatts to over 1 gigawatt are in planning in Germany. Experts estimate that a single 100-megawatt data center requires between 200 million and 930 million liters of water annually, depending on the cooling technology used—comparable to the drinking water needs of a small town of up to 20,000 people. In already dry regions, these projects could cause acute groundwater stress, distribution conflicts affecting local communities, and damage to local ecosystems.