By 2030, AI’s water use will match the needs of 1.3bn people while its power use triples that of 650m, a UN University investigation warns. It finds that AI is driving a surge in land, water and climate consequences cascading from the technology’s intense and fast-rising energy consumption. Consequently, the UN University scientists call for urgent, multi-stakeholder action in a new UNU-INWEH report.
The report says that, by 2030, the global data centres powering AI are projected to consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity. This is nearly triple the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria, countries collectively home to more than 650m people. Their associated water footprint will equal the basic annual domestic water needs of all 1.3bn people in Sub-Saharan Africa, and their land footprint will exceed 14,500km2, roughly twice the Jakarta metropolitan area, home to more than 32m people.
Researchers have warned about the greenhouse gas emissions of data centres before. But the UN scientists now argue that the environmental costs of AI and data centres cannot be understood through carbon emissions alone. In their report, they quantify the carbon, water and land footprints of AI’s electricity use across the globe.
The researchers say that AI’s environmental cost is being systematically mismeasured. Most existing assessments focus on the carbon emissions associated with training large models. Yet every kilowatt-hour of electricity used to train or run an AI system also carries a water footprint, from cooling and power generation, and a land footprint, from energy infrastructure and supply chains.
These three footprints do not move in the same direction. Switching from coal to bioenergy, for example, can on average cut the carbon footprint of electricity by 70%, while increasing its water footprint more than 30-fold and its land footprint a 100-fold.
The report concludes that “low-carbon” is not automatically “low-water” or “low-land” and warns that evaluating AI sustainability through a single metric can hide trade-offs and shift environmental burdens onto regions already facing water or land stress.
The numbers compound rapidly at the infrastructure level. Global data centres consumed an estimated 448 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025. If treated as a nation, they would have been the world’s 11th largest electricity consumer, behind France and ahead of Saudi Arabia.