Casey Christie
As a lifelong security professional and defense analyst, I have spent and continue to spend my life scanning the horizon for threats – whether to my clients, my country or humanity. Most dangers come and go, some can be mitigated. Others must simply be avoided altogether. Yet one potential risk has stayed with me since my early teens. A holy man I was introduced to as a teenager in India warned that one day wars would be fought over water. I was skeptical at the time, to say the least, but the seed was planted. And for the past 25 years, I have been searching for the catalyst that might turn this prediction into reality. I am now convinced I have found it: artificial intelligence and its unquenchable thirst for clean water.
And for decades the United Nations has warned that water shortage could become one of the greatest drivers of conflict in the twenty-first century. As former World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin starkly predicted: “Many of the wars of this century were about oil, but wars of the next century will be about water.” Until recently these warnings focused on familiar pressures – climate change, population growth and mismanagement. But a new and less visible force is now accelerating the crisis: the vast, unquenchable thirst of modern technology. Data centers supporting artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies and the broader digital economy are consuming water on an unprecedented scale. As the technological infrastructure of the future expands, it risks tipping already fragile water systems past the point of recovery with serious consequences for global peace and security.
Technology’s Growing Demand for Water
Water is indispensable to modern technological infrastructure. High-performance data centers require massive amounts of water to cool the servers that sustain digital processes. In the US alone data centers consumed an estimated 626 billion liters of water in 2021, with projections indicating a sharp rise as AI models grow larger and demand ever more computational power. Training a single large AI model can require the same amount of water as manufacturing hundreds of automobiles.
Yet this immense demand remains largely hidden from public view.
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