research

A River Runs Through the Cloud: The Hidden Water Consumption of Swiss Data Centers

Data centers are the physical backbone of the digital world, and they require vast quantities of water to operate. As cloud and AI services are deployed on an ever-larger scale, these facilities will draw more heavily on local water resources in the future, also in Switzerland. At the same time, both the federal government and the public remain largely in the dark about exactly how much water the country’s data centers consume. With increasingly frequent droughts and water scarcity, this could become a problem.