The information communication technology sector will experience huge growth over the coming years, with 29.3 billion devices expected online by 2030, up from 18.4 billion in 2018. To reliably support the online services used by these billions of users, data centres have been built around the world to provide the millions of servers they contain with access to power, cooling and internet connectivity. Whilst the energy consumption of these facilities regularly receives mainstream and academic coverage, analysis of their water consumption is scarce. Data centres consume water directly for cooling, in some cases 57% sourced from potable water, and indirectly through the water requirements of non-renewable electricity generation. Although in the USA, data centre water consumption (1.7 billion litres/day) is small compared to total water consumption (1218 billion litres/day), there are issues of transparency with less than a third of data centre operators measuring water consumption. This paper examines the water consumption of data centres, the measurement of that consumption, highlights the lack of data available to assess water efficiency, and discusses and where the industry is going in attempts to reduce future consumption.

未来几年，信息通信技术行业将实现巨大的增长，到2030年，预计将有293亿台设备在线使用，高于2018年的184亿个。为了可靠地支持这数十亿用户使用的在线服务，围绕全球范围内，为其中包含的数百万台服务器提供电源，散热和互联网连接。这些设施的能耗经常受到主流和学术界的关注，但对其用水量的分析却很少。数据中心直接消耗用于冷却的水，在某些情况下，其中57％的水来自饮用水，而间接消耗的能源则来自不可再生的发电。虽然在美国，数据中心的耗水量（1。70亿升/天）相对于总用水量（12180亿升/天）而言很小，存在透明度问题，只有不到三分之一的数据中心运营商来衡量水消耗量。本文研究了数据中心的用水量，该用水量的度量，突出了缺乏可用于评估用水效率的数据，并讨论了该行业在减少未来用水量方面的努力。