Data centre Abilene, Texas

Kit Knightly – Off-Guardian June 5, 2026

We are currently witnessing the birth of a new psy-op targeting our most vital natural resource – water. And in the coming series of articles we’ll be breaking down every aspect of this emerging agenda.

The chosen label for this new fear-as-control exercise is “water bankruptcy” . It’s a name originating in a UN report published earlier this year.

The decades old grumbling rumours of a  “water crisis” just weren’t scary enough you see, so just as global warming became “climate change”, and then “global heating”, and now “global boiling” –  so this  “crisis” is rebooted as something irresistibly alarming.

The language alone is the first indicator of what we really have here.

The broad stroke of the “water bankruptcy” narrative is:

1. The planet is running out of clean, safe drinking water
2. Climate change and the rise of AI are causing this problem,

…and – of course –

3. We really need to do something about it.

The fast developing and dark reality is a plan that will use deliberately instilled fear of water shortages to manufacture fake water shortages, and then police, commodify and monetize the global water supply in the name of “water security”.

It’s the next big psy-op evolving before our eyes, and in this series we’ll be covering every aspect of it:

– “Climate change” propaganda,

– Proposed legislative “solutions”

– The role of surveillance technology, and

– The inevitable financial pay-outs for the private sector.

Today, in part one of this series, we’ll be looking at what seems to be a tent pole of this emerging narrative – Data centres.

Very recently we have seen the emergence of a rash of media scare stories on data centres. Claims about their energy consumption and water usage are suddenly flooding the information marketplace.

This is an odd development because data centres would seem to represent the very beating heart of the surveillance state these outlets routinely promote.

The stories range from the mildly critical, as in this piece from the Times:

Surge in data centres set to push water bills even higher

To the slightly concerned, such as this from the BBC:

Scottish data centres powering AI already using enough water to fill 27 million bottles a year

To the quasi-apocalyptic, such as this offering from the ever-hysterical Guardian:

What you see here is a wetland without water’: how the datacentre boom is exacerbating Chile’s mega-drought

Or this from Al Jazeera:

AI’s growing thirst for water is becoming a public health risk

It’s no different in the US, where headlines like this…

America’s AI Boom Is Running Into An Unplanned Water Problem

Or this…

AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water

…are proliferating rapidly.

Yes, bizarre as it seems the establishment media are attacking the reputation of establishment data centres.

And it gets even odder when you look a little closer – because virtually all the scare stories they are publishing are either wildy exaggerated, decontextualised or simply NOT TRUE.

So, what is the reality quotient here?

Let’s take a look. This Reuters article headlines:

AI to double data centre power and water consumption by 2030

The trouble is it gives no context for what that “doubling” means in comparative terms.

It cites the fact that data centres use  “4.5 trillion liters per year” – and that does sound like a lot, but when we retrieve the missing context we find that total amount of water used annually by human beings is around 4 quadrillion litres, almost 1000x times as much.

Meaning data centres currently account for just ~0.1% of global water usage.

Sure a 2025 report estimated US-based data centres used 449 million gallons of water per day, it didn’t mention that  manufacturing uses 15 billion, over thirty times as much, while the energy sector uses closer to 100 billion.

So, that scary-seeming “doubling by 2030” the UN mentioned means data centres will be accounting for just 0.2% of global water usage by 2030 – and that’s supposing all domestic, agricultural and industrial usage stays exactly the same in that time (which, of course, they won’t).

Whatever we may think of data centres as a tool of Big Brother, it’s still true that, in terms of environmental impact, farming, manufacturing and energy production all use many times more water than they do.

The press also go out of their way to muddy the distinction between “direct water use” and “indirect water use”.

Brief explanation about this:

Direct water use would be the water you use to drink, cook, clean or bathe.

Indirect water use is the water used to grow the food you eat or manufacture your clothes.

This is a clear distinction that the mainstream media have been disregarding when talking about the “water footprint” of data centres.

They routinely include indirect usage such as “water used in the production of energy” (eg. to cool nuclear power stations or in thermoelectric plants etc.) or in the manufacturing chips and other parts as part of the data centres’ direct usage.

See the recent report “Water-guzzling data centres”, from Oxford University [emphasis added]:

Water directly used for cooling is what most data centre operators focus on, but the largest source of water usage is actually electricity generation. This comes from how water is heated to generate steam which turns a turbine and generates electricity. Fossil fuels and nuclear power all consume water in this way, and even hydroelectric power involves some water loss from reservoirs.

Blaming data centres for water lost from hydroelectric dam reservoirs because they use some of the electricity produced? Does that make sense? And is this standard applied to every industry?

These and other misrepresentations are very well broken down in this post by Andy Masley. I recommend it to anyone interested in unpicking this strange story.

For example, it is commonly believed that data centres poison ground water – but again this is a distortion, because while  they can can concentrate contaminants already present in the water via evaporation, or they can add cleaning and anti-scaling chemicals  this is something common to virtually all industrial processes and coolant systems. There’s nothing unique about the way data centres do this.

It’s also true that many AI data centres use no water at all. Between 10% and 25% of operational data centres run air-cooling systems using refrigeration gasses (this number was much higher as recently as 2024, but many have switched because liquid cooling uses substantially less electricity). And many water-cooled centres use a closed loop system that reuses water repeatedly and treat it on site.

And no – I’m not going to bat for big tech here or volunteering to down a pint of coolant run off. I’m just reporting the fact that your average data centre is no better or worse for the water supply than most industrial sectors, and in fact uses far less water than most.

The really important question here is – why are the media torturing the statistics and definitions to create fear headlines about something so entrenched in the governmental control system?

And in fact not just the media. This strange narrative construction extends beyond the press or governmental reports and into live-action political theatre.

Witness the absurd spectacle of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez waving a jam jar full of mud around congress, screaming that data centers are making water unfit to drink:

 

Is that water even from Georgia any more than Colin Powell’s test tube contained anthrax? It doesn’t matter and she doesn’t know, it was just handed to her before she went on stage, and for anyone interested, the actual details of the case are that a local well may have suffered sediment build up thanks to digging/construction work.  It has literally nothing to do with the data centre’s usage of water – because he thing wasn’t actually operational yet.

Veteran campaigner Erin Brockovich has also joined the crusade, starting up a registry of data centres for the whole country.

A new report from the UN is “warning” (reports always “warn”) about the AI boom and the resources – especially land and water – that it’s using.

Multiple states or localities of the US are trying to ban the construction of data centres, mostly because of their “guzzling” water. This first one passed yesterday. According to a recent poll, most Americans would rather live near a nuclear reactor than a data centre.

Even Pope Leo XIV – yes, his High Holiness himself – is warning the faithful about AI data centres and the “enormous amounts of energy and water” they use.

Maybe these latter high profile contributions begin to offer some clue as to why the mainstream is demonising one of its own major tools.

AI data centers are ruining the water – something needs to be done about it.

And in case we had any doubts that this is where the ‘scary data centre’ narrative is going, Chatham House is here to really lay it out for you:

AI water usage requires governments to rethink their approach to water

…so what exactly does “rethinking our approach to water” mean?

We’ll discuss that later in the series.

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