Every time you stream a video, send an email, or ask an AI a question, something physical happens far from your screen. Somewhere, in a vast hall the size of a sports stadium, thousands of servers wake up to serve your request. They draw power from a grid, pump water through cooling towers, and occupy land that once held fields or forests. The digital world is not weightless. It has a body — and that body is growing fast.
Is the Cloud the Biggest Electricity Consumer You Never Noticed?
The Hidden Infrastructure of the Digital Age
How Electricity, Water, and Land Are Powering — and Straining — Our Online World
When you stream a video, send a message, or ask an AI a question, it feels effortless. But behind every click lies a vast physical world of humming servers, chilled halls, and soaring electricity bills. The cloud is not in the sky. It sits on the ground, draws enormous power, and drinks millions of litres of water every single day.
The numbers behind that statement are no longer theoretical. They are measured, reported, and in some places already contested in court.
1. The Invisible Made Visible
In the modern imagination, digital services exist in an intangible realm. In reality, every email, video stream, AI interaction, and cloud-stored photograph depends on massive physical facilities housing thousands of servers that never sleep. These data centres are multiplying at a pace that no single country’s power grid, water utility, or planning regime fully anticipated.
Global technology giants — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta — now operate hyperscale computing campuses capable of serving billions of users simultaneously. The numbers that define their footprint have begun to attract the kind of scrutiny once reserved for oil refineries and coal mines.
2. What Is Driving the Data Centre Boom?
Several converging forces are pushing demand to historic highs.
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence
The International Energy Agency’s April 2025 report on Energy and AI identified AI as the single most important driver of data centre growth. Global data centre electricity consumption stood at 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2024 — equivalent to roughly 1.5 percent of all electricity consumed on Earth that year. The IEA projects that figure will more than double to 945 TWh by 2030, representing consumption on a par with Japan’s entire national electricity demand.
Training a single large-scale AI model can require thousands of graphics processing units running continuously for weeks. Every inference query — every response a chatbot generates — also draws power. Inference already accounts for roughly 80 to 90 percent of all AI computing load, and that share is expected to approach 75 percent of total AI energy demand by 2030, as AI features become embedded in everyday consumer products.
India’s Accelerating Demand
India’s data centre sector consumed approximately 13 TWh of electricity in 2024, representing around 0.5 percent of total national demand. By 2030, that figure is projected to reach 57 TWh — a nearly fivefold increase — representing around 2.6 percent of total Indian demand, according to CEEW (Council on Energy, Environment and Water). As of January 2026, India hosts approximately 271 data centres occupying some 23 million square metres of floor space, with Mumbai alone accounting for nearly a quarter of national capacity.
3. The Electricity Appetite: Cities Within Buildings
A single hyperscale AI-focused data centre typically consumes between 100 and 300 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 80,000 to 200,000 homes. The IEA notes that the largest facilities currently under construction are expected to draw 20 times the load of a typical AI hyperscaler, putting some individual campuses in the range of a mid-size city’s worth of power.
| GLOBAL DATA CENTRE ELECTRICITY — 2024 415 TWhSource: IEA Energy and AI Report, April 2025. Projected to reach 945 TWh by 2030. |
Google’s 2024 sustainability report provides a concrete benchmark: its data centres alone consumed 30.8 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity in 2024 — more than double the 14.4 MWh recorded in 2020. Data centre operations accounted for 95.8 percent of the company’s entire electricity budget that year.
“Transparency, accuracy and rigor are the foundation of sustainability reporting. As the volume and complexity of data and strategies grow, we’re innovating our processes to meet rising expectations.”
— Luke Elder, Lead Sustainability Reporter, Google (2025 Environmental Report)
In India, clustering compounds the problem. The country’s five major hubs — Mumbai (61 facilities), Hyderabad (33), Delhi-NCR (31), Bengaluru (31), and Chennai (30) — concentrate extraordinary demand on grids that were not designed to absorb it. CEEW warns that localised demand spikes from data centres are far more challenging to integrate than distributed residential or industrial loads. In parts of the US, electricity prices near major data centre clusters have risen 2.7 times compared to 2020 levels, providing an early indicator of what concentrated demand can do to household bills.
4. The Water Cost: Cooling an Overheating Digital World
Electricity is not the only resource these facilities consume at scale. Servers generate enormous heat and must be cooled continuously. Most large data centres rely on evaporative cooling towers that dissipate heat by evaporating water — and approximately 80 percent of the water drawn is lost permanently to evaporation, never returned to the local watershed.
A standard industry estimate, cited by Macquarie Research and confirmed by multiple engineering assessments, is that data centres require approximately 25 million litres of water per megawatt of IT load per year. A 100-megawatt facility therefore draws roughly 2.5 billion litres annually. Globally, the IEA estimates the sector consumed around 560 billion litres in 2024 — equivalent to the domestic water demand of a metropolitan city of approximately 8 million people.
| INDIA DATA CENTRE WATER USE150 billion litres (2025)Projected to reach 358 billion litres by 2030. Source: CEEW / Mordor Intelligence. |
India’s situation is particularly acute. The country holds 18 percent of the world’s population but only 4 percent of its freshwater resources. An S&P Global study estimates that 60 to 80 percent of India’s data centres will face high water stress this decade. Approximately 70 percent of current capacity is concentrated in coastal and urban centres — Mumbai and Chennai — that already experience severe summer shortages.
“Water use does not figure prominently in any of these policy groups, and is a significant blind spot that places high risk on the long-term functioning of these centres. Imagine shutdowns of data centres in peak summer due to lack of water for cooling — how might this impact banking services, medical systems in hospitals using cloud services, transit system operation?”
— Sahana Goswami, Water Researcher, WRI India (World Resources Institute), November 2025
“We do not have full information on what technologies the companies are proposing.”
— Shalu Agrawal, Director of Programmes, Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), 2025
5. Case Study: Mekaguda Village, Ranga Reddy District, Telangana
The tension between digital infrastructure and rural communities is not hypothetical in India. It has already reached the courts.
Background
In March 2022, Microsoft announced plans to build a data centre on a 22-acre plot in Mekaguda — a village of approximately 1,000 residents in Ranga Reddy district, on the outskirts of Hyderabad. The facility was to be one of six data centres Microsoft planned to develop in the state over fifteen years, backed by a new 220-kilovolt grid supply line and dedicated electrical substations funded with state government support.
The Legal Challenge
In July 2023, a group of 57 farmers and local villagers filed WP (PIL) 49/2023 before the Telangana High Court, naming Microsoft, Natco Pharma, NDL, Pokarna Granite, and 35 other companies and government bodies as respondents. The petition alleged that Microsoft had illegally occupied land beyond its permitted boundaries and was dumping industrial waste into Tungakunta Government Lake — a protected waterbody identified under Walta Act, Section 23(1) to (5).
The petition stated that the alleged contamination had polluted groundwater in five surrounding villages, affecting an estimated 20,000 residents. Farmers reported that cattle had died after drinking from contaminated sources. One tenant farmer, Bandaru Shekaraiah, told the press that twenty of his cows had died over the preceding years and that he could no longer use groundwater on his seven acres of farmland. He was also suffering from skin ailments he attributed to water-quality deterioration.
Journalists from Rest of World visiting the site in July 2023 observed pipelines protruding from Microsoft’s boundary wall that connected to the ground in piles of mud. A stretch of land adjacent to the facility had been cleared of vegetation and secured with barbed wire bearing a “private property” sign placed between the company boundary wall and the fencing. Microsoft did not respond to questions about the pipelines.
Competing Positions
In September 2023, Microsoft filed a response asking the court to dismiss the petition, denying all allegations of illegal occupation or water contamination and characterising the company as an IT operator with no manufacturing activity on site.
Telangana’s Special Chief Secretary for Information Technology and Electronic Communications, Jayesh Ranjan, told Rest of World: “There is no kind of error or oversight on the part of Microsoft. It is not some fly-by-night, local kind of a company. It is a global company with very high compliance standards.” In May 2024, a judge declined to grant an interim order compelling Microsoft to halt the contested activities while the petition remained pending.
“Corporations are bulldozing their way and the judiciary is extremely weak. Deals with large corporations are a feather in the cap of the local politician, which is why administrators don’t act against potential violations.”
— Jasveen Jairath, Founding Convener, Save Our Urban Lakes citizens’ initiative, 2023
As of early 2026, construction of the Mekaguda data centre had proceeded to completion, with the facility expected to employ 180 people. The High Court petition remained active.
6. The Land Footprint: Industrial Parks for the Internet
Beyond energy and water, data centres demand substantial land. A hyperscale campus can occupy between 50 and 150 acres, accommodating server halls, cooling towers, electrical substations, backup generators, and network equipment. In 2024, India’s data centre sector occupied between 30 and 50 million square feet of real estate, with annual land absorption for new facilities estimated at 7 to 10 million square feet. Mumbai alone accounted for over 40 percent of national demand, with individual data centre parks spanning 10 to 25 acres each.
This land pressure frequently places digital infrastructure in direct conflict with agricultural use, residential communities, and protected waterbodies — as the Mekaguda case illustrates. The pattern is global: in Aragon, Spain, Amazon’s data centres are expected to use enough water to irrigate 233 hectares of corn, prompting the formation of the activist group Tu Nube Seca Mi Río (“Your cloud is drying my river”).
“Each one of those buildings is using as much as a city’s worth of power, so that power infrastructure is having a huge impact on our communities — the transmission lines, the eminent domain used to get the land, the energy infrastructure, gas plants, pipelines, the air pollution associated with that, the climate impacts of all of that.”
— Rebecca Bolthouse, environmental advocate, Northern Virginia (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2025)
7. Innovations Pointing Toward a Greener Digital Future
The industry is responding to mounting criticism with a new generation of cooling and energy solutions, though the pace of adoption remains debated.
Liquid Immersion Cooling
Advanced immersion cooling submerges server components directly in specialised dielectric liquids that absorb heat far more efficiently than air, cutting both energy and water requirements. Adoption has been slow, however, due to high capital costs, limited vendor choice, and technical complexity, according to CEEW’s January 2026 assessment.
Closed-Loop Cooling and Water Recycling
Closed-loop systems reuse water repeatedly, reducing freshwater draw by up to 70 percent. Sahana Goswami of WRI India has cited Navi Mumbai as a positive Indian example, where industries partner with municipal water utilities to recycle treated wastewater — a model she argues the data centre sector should adopt systematically.
Renewable Energy Integration
Google signed contracts for over 8 gigawatts of additional clean energy generation in 2024 — double its prior-year total — and reported that its data centres achieved 66 percent carbon-free energy on an hourly-matching basis. Microsoft has pledged to become water-positive by 2030. Amazon has committed to replenishing 3.9 billion litres annually through water restoration projects.
In India, the Yotta NM1 data centre near Mumbai — the country’s largest facility — already sources approximately 50 percent of its power from renewables, with a target of 70 percent. Ireland’s 2025 policy, requiring new data centres to self-generate and source 80 percent of energy from new renewables, is cited by Indian policy researchers as a model worth adapting.
8. Data Centres as Strategic National Assets
India generates approximately 20 percent of global data but currently stores less than 6 percent domestically. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023 has accelerated the drive toward local storage, while the IndiaAI Mission and state-level subsidies are positioning data centres as core national infrastructure. Total capital expenditure in the sector is projected to reach 30 to 45 billion US dollars by 2027.
The scale of private commitment is striking. Adani Group’s AdaniConneX joint venture has made a 100 billion US dollar commitment by 2035. Reliance Industries has pledged nearly 110 billion US dollars through its Digital Connexion joint venture, including a planned facility in Jamnagar that aims to be the world’s largest by capacity.
9. The Sustainability Imperative
The promises made by technology companies are significant — but researchers warn they are insufficient on their own. Unlike carbon dioxide emissions, whose effects are global, water scarcity is local: Amazon’s replenishment investments in one river basin do not restore aquifer levels in Ranga Reddy district.
There is also a structural accountability gap. Research has shown that technology companies routinely hide corporate identities behind local subsidiaries, invoke trade secrecy to block environmental oversight, and delegate construction to lesser-known contractors to deflect public scrutiny. In India, where regulatory capacity is uneven and communities may be unaware that a new data centre is being planned near their water source, these practices carry particular risk.
“When officials talk about more data centres, the conversation has to include questions of accountability for land, water, power and even the promise of jobs.”
— Arpita Kanjilal, Researcher, Digital Empowerment Foundation, New Delhi, 2025
Future planning must carefully balance:
✔️ Energy grid capacity and the ability of existing power systems to absorb surging, geographically concentrated demand
✔️ Water availability in regions already under climatic stress, with mandatory disclosure of cooling technology and usage volumes before construction approval
✔️ Environmental impact on local ecosystems, agricultural livelihoods, and waterbodies protected under law
✔️ Urban and regional land use that serves all citizens, not only corporate campuses
Conclusion: The Weight of the Weightless World
The digital world may appear weightless. The infrastructure supporting it is not. Data centres consumed 415 TWh of electricity globally in 2024 — and that figure will double by 2030. They draw 560 billion litres of water annually from the same aquifers and reservoirs that farming communities and city residents depend upon. In India’s Ranga Reddy district, that competition is already in court.
The future of the digital age will depend not only on technological breakthroughs — but on transparent, enforceable, and locally accountable stewardship of the planet’s finite and precious resources. The cloud must answer for what it takes from the earth.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
| Global data centre electricity consumption reached 415 TWh in 2024, growing at 12 percent per year for five consecutive years. It is projected to reach 945 TWh by 2030 (IEA). |
| Google’s data centres alone consumed 30.8 million MWh in 2024 — more than double their 2020 consumption of 14.4 million MWh. |
| India’s data centre water use is expected to more than double from 150 billion litres in 2025 to 358 billion litres by 2030 (CEEW / Mordor Intelligence). |
| An S&P Global study estimates 60–80 percent of India’s data centres will face high water stress this decade. India holds 18 percent of the world’s population but only 4 percent of its freshwater. |
| In Mekaguda, Ranga Reddy District, Telangana, 57 farmers filed WP (PIL) 49/2023 before the Telangana High Court alleging pollution of Tungakunta Government Lake, affecting an estimated 20,000 villagers across five villages. |
| In parts of the US, electricity prices near major data centre clusters have already risen 2.7 times compared to 2020 levels. |
| Innovations such as closed-loop cooling, immersion cooling, and renewable energy integration offer measurable pathways to sustainability, but adoption remains slow due to cost and regulatory inaction. |
Data current as of March 2026. Sources: IEA Energy and AI Report (April 2025); CEEW India Data Centre White Paper (February 2026); Google 2024 Environmental Report; WRI India; Telangana High Court WP (PIL) 49/2023; Rest of World; CBC News; Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
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