To: Every AI company, every data center operator, every investor funding this industry — and the regulators who are supposed to be watching
Water is not a raw material. It is not a byproduct line item in a sustainability report. It is the single resource every human being, every farm, every ecosystem on this planet depends on to survive — and right now, it is being poured into machines that generate marketing copy, chatbots, and image generators at a scale that should alarm anyone paying attention.

This has to stop. Not slow down. Not "improve efficiency." Stop.

The Scale of the Problem
The numbers being reported by the industry itself — numbers that likely understate the real total, since most companies still refuse full disclosure — are staggering:

• Global data centers consumed an estimated 222 billion litres of water for cooling in 2025 alone. Left unchecked, that number is projected to nearly triple to 644 billion litres by 2030.
• Google's own disclosures show its water consumption hit 10.9 billion gallons in 2025 — a 34% jump in a single year, and more than double what it consumed in 2021. This is not a company slowing down. This is a company accelerating its consumption while asking the public for patience.
• Amazon has disclosed 2.5 billion gallons withdrawn by its data centers. Microsoft, Meta, and others report their own figures using inconsistent methodologies specifically designed to make direct comparison — and public accountability — difficult.
• Roughly two-thirds of data centers built since 2022 are located in regions already classified as water-stressed. These companies are not choosing neutral locations. They are choosing convenience and cheap power over the communities who already do not have enough water.
• In Texas alone, 83% of data centers have failed to comply with mandatory water reporting requirements. Even where laws exist requiring disclosure, companies are simply ignoring them — and facing no meaningful consequence.
• The U.S. Geological Survey, despite decades of tracking national water withdrawal data, has never even created a category to track data center water use. We do not have a full picture of this crisis because the people responsible for measuring it have not been made to.

This is not a story about efficiency gains outpacing consumption. It is a story about an industry that is growing faster than any oversight built to contain it, drinking from the same wells as the families, farmers, and ecosystems around it, while offering vague promises about "water positive" goals a decade away.

Why "Efficiency" Is Not Good Enough
AI companies will tell you they are getting better. They will point to closed-loop cooling, direct-to-chip systems, and improved Water Usage Effectiveness scores. Some of this is real. None of it is sufficient.

Efficiency gains do not matter if they are outpaced by growth. A company that cuts its water use per server by 30% while tripling the number of servers has not solved anything — it has simply made the problem harder to see in a press release. That is exactly the pattern happening today: efficiency metrics improving on paper while absolute consumption climbs year over year.

And even the most optimistic "closed-loop" cooling systems do not address the water consumed generating the electricity these data centers draw, or the water used manufacturing the chips and hardware inside them. A company can claim "zero water cooling" and still be responsible for enormous hidden water consumption upstream. Partial fixes marketed as solutions are not solutions. They are cover.

What We Demand

We are not asking for incremental targets, voluntary pledges, or promises for the year 2040. We are demanding an immediate, binding, and total commitment:

1. Zero direct water consumption, effective immediately, across every data center facility — through mandatory closed-loop, air-based, or direct-to-chip cooling with no exceptions and no phase-in period long enough to be meaningless.
2. Full, independently audited public disclosure of every gallon and litre of water consumed — direct withdrawal, water embedded in purchased electricity, and water used in hardware manufacturing — reported quarterly, using one standardized methodology across every company, with no more self-selected metrics designed to obscure the true total.
3. An immediate moratorium on new data center construction in any region already classified as water-stressed, with no new permits issued until a company can demonstrate true zero-water operation.
4. Binding regulation with real penalties, not voluntary industry pledges. Companies that fail to report, or that exceed water consumption limits, must face fines large enough to actually change behavior — not the cost-of-doing-business fines that have failed to stop this crisis so far.
5. Community veto power. No data center should be built in any community without the explicit, informed consent of the people whose water supply it will draw from — and that consent must be revocable if promises are broken.
6. An end to the framing that water use is an acceptable trade-off for AI progress. No convenience delivered by a chatbot or an AI-generated image is worth a farmer's well running dry, a town's water restrictions, or a river ecosystem collapsing.

 

Sign This Petition
Every signature here is a statement: water does not belong to the technology industry. It belongs to all of us, and to the generations who come after us. We will not accept vague sustainability pledges, decade-long timelines, or self-reported statistics from companies that have shown no willingness to be honest about the scale of what they are consuming.

If you believe AI companies should not be allowed to treat a shared, finite, life-sustaining resource as a free input for their data centers — sign this petition, and share it with everyone you know.

Water is not technology's to spend.