Every summer, Bengaluru goes back to doing what it knows too well — figuring out how to make its water last. The Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) puts out its action plan, neighbourhoods brace for tighter days, and tankers begin to fill the gaps.
But this time, the city is juggling an additional demand, one that doesn’t slow down when the taps do — its data centres, and the water they greedily consume.
That issue now sits at the centre of Karnataka’s push to rewrite its data centre policy. In the Assembly this March, Information Technology (IT) Minister Priyank Kharge warned that data centres were "heavy water and energy guzzlers" and said the state needed a greener approach. He said 1 mega watt (MW) of data centre capacity requires one acre of land and Rs 70 crore in investment. Each mega watt demands 25 million litres of water a year.
"If you ask five questions on ChatGPT, 500 ml of water is needed," Priyank told legislators. "We have to re-look the existing policy and come up with a sustainable one."
Before the state can draft a sustainable policy, it must answer a question it has not systematically measured: how much water does this industry actually draw?
TNM asked the government how much water the data centres are consuming. And the responses of the water board, the pollution control board, and the IT department revealed why the Minister’s warning has become more urgent than he may have intended.
Data centres are large facilities that house the servers, storage systems, and networking equipment that power everything from cloud computing to artificial intelligence. They run continuously, generate enormous heat, and require constant cooling, which is why water sits at the centre of their environmental footprint. Karnataka has 32 private data centres, of which 31 are in Bengaluru.