Britons are being urged to delete their old emails and pictures to help conserve water amid the current heatwave. Official government advice says that this will help reduce pressure on the water environment because “data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.”
The advice was part of a list of water-saving tips for the home, which also included fixing leaking toilets, turning off taps while brushing your teeth, and taking shorter showers. According to the National Drought Group, which includes the Met Office, government, regulators, and water companies, the UK’s water shortage is now a “nationally significant incident.”
The country has just endured its hottest six-month spell since 1976, with July the fifth-hottest on record. Five areas are now officially in drought after six straight months of below-average rainfall. In July, almost half of all river flows were below average, and two hit their lowest levels on record for the month.
“We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions,” Helen Wakeham, the Environment Agency’s Director of Water and chair of the NDG, said in a statement. “Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife.”
Data centres, which house the cloud servers that store old emails and photos, require a lot of energy; their construction has actually been held up in the UK due to insufficient electricity supply. That energy use generates substantial waste heat, but they must be kept cool to extend equipment life and prevent outages, often using chilled-water or evaporative cooling systems.
Backlash to the UK government’s email deletion request
However, the plea for individuals to delete their photos and emails has received backlash. If an email is 75 kB, the electricity required to save it to the cloud is around 5.85×10⁻⁷ kWh per month. Typically, the Water Usage Effectiveness of a data centre is 1.8 L/kWh, meaning storing an email for a month would use approximately one-thousandth of a millilitre of water.
It is actually more likely that rooting out old emails and photos to delete them will use more energy than simply leaving them in a spun-down state. Any potential water savings would also be local to the data centre, which could be anywhere in the world, as the UK has no blanket requirement to keep data in-country.
AI uses much more water than storing an email in the cloud
In comparison, writing one 100-word email with GPT-4 uses approximately 519 millilitres of water, slightly more than one 16.9-ounce bottle. ChatGPT is on track to reach 700 million weekly active users, and sits firmly at the top of the App Store and Google Play charts, much to Elon Musk’s dismay.
The government is also heavily promoting AI use in its AI Opportunities Action Plan, which has been accompanied by partnerships with OpenAI and NVIDIA, supercomputer construction, and deployment of AI tools within the public sector. The largest data centre in Europe will be built in Hertfordshire.
The government is keen for the country to be seen as a “world leader” in AI, reaping economic and societal benefits of its use. Unfortunately, AI is extremely detrimental to the environment and, therefore, society. The resulting surge in demand from power centres is increasing air pollution, which has been linked to thousands of deaths. Cooling the power-hungry data centres, which tend to be built in drought-prone areas, is also known to massively strain water supplies, resulting in pushback from those living in their vicinity.
One of Meta’s data centres in Newton County, Georgia, USA, accounts for approximately 10% of the area’s total daily water usage, and residents are dealing with water pressure issues so severe that they can’t sell their houses to relocate. Even trying to regulate data centres is difficult because operators are notoriously poor at disclosing their water and energy usage.
China has switched on a new underwater AI data centre off the coast of Shanghai, using ocean water to cool high-performance servers while tapping offshore wind for power.
