Cloud lobby warns EU: Clamp down on water rules and we'll evaporate

CISPE floats reforms to avoid new costs, fragmentation, and infrastructure flight

The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade body has put forward recommendations for the EU's Water Resilience Strategy, perhaps mindful that datacenters are perceived as hugely wasteful of precious water resources.

My take on this is that maybe they are not moving as fast as the EU would want, given Europe is now more prone to drought conditions in the future due to climate change..

CISPE called for harmonization across sectors, and said investment is required to deliver effective water resilience. It also warned that burdensome regulatory demands might see operators choose to build elsewhere instead.

Styling itself as the voice of the EU's cloud sector, the consortium claims its views offer valuable insight from businesses in the region to support a sustainable European economy.

Water scarcity, it says, is rapidly becoming a major challenge and the group strongly supports the European Commission's commitments to put water resilience at the heart of the Green Deal, the EC's policy initiatives aimed at making Europe climate neutral by 2050.

As cloud providers and bit barn operators, CISPE members can play a dual role in achieving the Commission's aims, it says, as "responsible" water users and as innovative enablers of better water management.

However, an Oxford University study found that even a relatively small 1 MW datacenter would use 26 million liters (6.86 million gallons) of water per year with traditional cooling methods, while in the US, some facilities can consume anywhere between 300,000 and four million gallons of water a day.

CISPE's policy paper outlines four recommendations for the Commission to consider following the unveiling of the water resilience strategy earlier this month.

The first is to define a formal EU framework to support Europe-wide industrial water reuse/return schemes to enable the treatment and reuse of municipal wastewater for other uses, including datacenter cooling. This would help to prevent drinking-quality water being used for this purpose.

Another recommendation is to create incentives to invest in water system modernization through public-private partnerships (PPPs), creating funding mechanisms that combine private sector capital with public sector oversight.

As CISPE is a cloud body, it is perhaps unsurprising it also suggests cloud-based digital water management solutions that would combine digital twins, AI analytics, IoT sensors, and potentially other buzzwords too. This would enable better leak detection, reduce water waste, optimize treatment processes, and enable proactive responses to environmental challenges, it claims.

The final recommendation is simply to ensure a coherent water resilience framework across all industry sectors, and avoid duplicating the efforts of other, existing EU frameworks.

"Datacenters are vital to Europe's digital infrastructure, economic resilience, and public services," states CISPE's policy doc.

"The sector is already navigating high energy costs, uneven electricity market access, and complex regulatory demands. Imposing new, standalone water regulations could increase costs, create regulatory fragmentation, and deter investment. This risks shifting infrastructure outside the EU – undermining both sustainability and sovereignty goals," it claims, which to our mind carries a soupçon of threat.

Omdia Chief Analyst Roy Illsley told us that water use in datacenters is an issue, but one that operators are aware of and have been taking steps to reduce over the years.

"My take on this is that maybe they are not moving as fast as the EU would want, given Europe is now more prone to drought conditions in the future due to climate change," he said.

"Any recommendations that encourage the minimization of water use are to be welcomed," commented IDC's EMEA Senior Research Director, Andrew Buss.

"We do need to recognize early that (potable/irrigation quality) water is a precious resource that we should not squander. Using gray water or captured water where possible, reusing and recycling water, using seawater if feasible, are all to be encouraged," he added.

With AI-capable servers pushing up power densities, there is a greater need for cooling, but the analysts agreed that a move to direct-to-chip liquid cooling should cut the amount of water used in overall operations, as well as reducing the need for legacy approaches such as evaporative cooling. ®