The UK government's blueprint for turning Britain into an AI superpower largely ignore the water datacenters need, prompting warnings that these facilities could end up competing with homes and businesses for supply. The warning comes as parts of southern, central, and eastern England move closer to drought, putting the pressure on water availability firmly on the agenda. MPs were told earlier this year that official forecasts of England's future water needs excluded datacenters, despite government efforts to encourage more of them to power AI development. In written evidence to a parliamentary committee, Water UK, the trade association for Britain's water industry, said the government's policies for delivering AI Growth Zones under the AI Opportunities Action Plan appear to assume the country will have ample supplies of H₂O. This, Water UK argues, limits the investment that water companies can plan for, including new reservoirs, leaving future supply constrained by forecasts that it says are already too low. The submission claims some housing projects are already being blocked and businesses barred from expanding because water isn't available. Water UK says supply is so constrained that the Environment Agency has effectively imposed a moratorium on business expansion in East Anglia and parts of Essex. Water UK is calling for new supply infrastructure to be fast-tracked and abstraction limits to be reviewed. It also wants operators to cover the infrastructure costs their facilities create, minimum efficiency standards for server farms, and requirements to use non-potable water wherever possible. Current economics push operators toward cooling methods that save energy rather than water. Where water is relatively cheap compared to energy, operators favour using more of it to use less power, as The Register previously detailed. UK energy prices are among the highest in the developed world. The submission says global datcenter water use is expected to more than double between 2025 and 2050, with services-based economies like the UK likely to account for a disproportionate share of that growth. T he UK datacenter pipeline is almost double that of the next-largest country in Europe, with ambitions to treble capacity by 2030. A government report [PDF] says most of the UK's current datacenter capacity is sited in and around London, with more than 1,000 MW located there. Europe's largest datacenter cluster is reportedly in Slough, Berkshire, home to as many as 35 facilities. The same report notes UK datacenter operators aren't required to report water use, so no official consumption figures exist, though the Water Research Centre estimates English facilities use almost 1.9 billion liters a year. According to PublicTechnology, the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance warned last year that AI is driving a significant, yet often underestimated, rise in water consumption, threatening water security both globally and in the UK A Water UK spokesperson told The Register: "We desperately want to supply the water that datacenters need. That's impossible because the UK government explicitly excludes them from its water planning framework for England." Water companies have been given approval to build ten reservoirs, but they will take years to complete, the spokesperson added. "We need planning hurdles cleared and water efficiency standards for datacenters introduced. Major businesses should pay for the water infrastructure they need so that the costs don't fall onto households." The Register also asked the relevant government department for comment, but had not received a response by the time of publication. ®

Amazon Web Services is facing a lawsuit alleging it published false and misleading statements about the water use and sustainability of its Northern Virginia datacenters, "falsely" portraying those operations as environmentally responsible. The complaint, case number CL26002535-00 filed with the Circuit Court of Arlington County last week, seen by The Register, states that AWS has never publicly disclosed its actual water consumption in the region, known as the world's "datacenter capital." Despite this, the filing says, AWS has repeatedly published assertions regarding its water use and sustainability credentials that the suit alleges to be false, misleading, or unsubstantiated. By doing so, it has hidden the true scale of its water consumption, preventing policymakers and the public from independently assessing the accuracy of its claims, the complaint adds. The named plaintiff in this case is Dr Nathan Wangusi, a water resources scientist who served as the water sustainability program manager at AWS for almost three years until September 2024. The lawsuit says Dr Wangusi obtained detailed billing and water consumption records for AWS facilities in Northern Virginia using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests sent to water utilities in the region covering 2023 through 2026. The US's Freedom of Information Act gives any person – a private citizen, a foreign national, or a corporation – the statutory right to request access to federal agency records. The lawsuit claims that these FOIA records "materially differ" from the publicly reported water use figures disclosed by AWS. In particular, the complaint pours cold water – pun intended – on some assertions AWS made in a blog post last month, and covered by The Register at the time. For example, AWS said that in Northern Virginia, it had "dropped water use by 42 percent year-over-year, even as demand for computing continued to grow." AWS, however, did not disclose the comparison period, reporting boundary, or methodology underlying that figure, making independent verification impossible, Dr Wangusi claims in the lawsuit. The complaint goes on to allege: In addition, the filing claims that AWS did not reveal whether its published water withdrawal figures apply only to its own datacenters, or whether they include colocation facilities in the region operated by Equinix, QTS, Digital Realty, and Iron Mountain, where AWS also has infrastructure deployed. Liquid courage The complaint also questions AWS's statement that it is "75 percent of the way to water positive." In Northern Virginia, where AWS made the water positive commitment, the lawsuit claims that FOIA data and Amazon's own portfolio show returns covering 22 to 25 percent of documented consumption. The plaintiff alleges that, by contrast, the 75 percent figure is a global metric that counts 17 projects still under construction. Another representation Dr Wangusi alleges is misleading is a claim that AWS datacenters in Northern Virginia operate "ninety-seven percent of the year by pulling outside air and not using any water." In contrast, or so the lawsuit states, the utility records all show AWS facilities withdrawing water all year round, from January 2023 to December 2026, including the winter months when AWS says that water cooling is largely unnecessary. Datacenter lobbying group Virginia Connects is named as a co-defendant in the lawsuit. The complaint claims the outfit, which promotes datacenter benefits to Virginia stakeholders, conducted a coordinated video advertising campaign on the same date that AWS published its "42 percent reduction" claim, promoting many of the same narratives that the complaint is characterizing as "false". Dr Wangusi claims Virginia Connects is controlled by the same individuals who govern the Data Center Coalition (DCC) trade association, of which AWS is an Executive Member, and alleges that the so-called "coordinated" campaign constitutes conspiracy to commit deceptive trade practices under Virginia law. According to the lawsuit, the legal case was filed after Dr Wangusi found no state agencies were willing to take action over discrepancies he saw in AWS’s self-reported water use and its actual recorded consumption. The complaint claims neither the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), "the State Water Control Board, local water utilities, nor affected communities possess authority to independently determine whether AWS's public water-use, water-positive, replenishment, water-stewardship, and sustainability representations are accurate, misleading, or substantiated." The filing claims Dr Wangusi submitted a complaint to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), which responded that Virginia law does not require datacenters to report water withdrawals to it, and that it lacks authority to independently verify usage. A complaint to the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia resulted in a referral back to DEQ, the lawsuit states. The filing – which includes Dr Wangusi's correspondence with the agencies attached as exhibits – added that the "FOIA Advisory Council likewise advised that factual disputes concerning public disclosures are matters reserved to the courts. Accordingly, Plaintiff exhausted all available administrative remedies before filing this action." Dr Wangusi is seeking a jury trial for the case, and wants the court to rule that the published water use, and sustainability claims are materially false or misleading, and order AWS to submit to the Virginia State Water Control Board and DEQ a complete accounting of its Northern Virginia water withdrawals. If the judgement goes against it, AWS would also be required to publish corrective disclosures within 30 days of judgment, disclosing its actual water consumption figures, the methodologies, and the supporting data underlying its claims. "Hyperscalers, including AWS and its competitors, continue to face public scrutiny over the integrity of their claims around environmental impact and resource usage for datacenters,” Omdia senior analyst for Sustainable Ecosystems, Ben Caddy told The Register. “Without stricter obligations for hyperscalers to be transparent about their resource use at a facility-specific level, it’s likely that these companies will continue to face more legal and reputational challenges about the local and global environmental impacts of their facilities,” he added. We asked Amazon for a statement regarding this lawsuit, but the corporation declined to comment, other than to insist its water replenishment and withdrawal data for 2025 were assured by a third-party provider. ®

IBM says customers spooked by soaring demand for AI infrastructure raided their mainframe budgets to stockpile servers, storage, and memory instead, knocking Big Blue's flagship Z business off course. Ahead of its full calendar Q2 earnings release next week, IBM took the unusual step of publishing preliminary quarterly results alongside a letter from CEO Arvind Krishna explaining why the numbers fell short of expectations. The biggest disappointment came in Infrastructure, where revenue fell 7 percent, despite what IBM had previously described as the strongest launch of a mainframe generation in its history. The disclosure led to a more-than 25 percent plunge in Big Blue's share price on Tuesday. The Q2 culprit wasn't a sudden loss of affection for mainframes, according to Krishna, but a last-minute scramble to secure hardware increasingly caught up in the AI spending boom. "In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases," Krishna wrote. "This dynamic impacted client buying patterns." IBM had expected some disruption from supply chain pressures, he said, "but we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization." That's an unusually candid admission from a company whose Z mainframes remain one of its highest-margin businesses. Customers, it seems, preferred to refresh infrastructure they fear might soon become more expensive or harder to obtain. The spending shift also rippled through IBM's software business because fewer mainframe deals meant weaker sales of the transaction-processing software that typically accompanies them. Krishna pointed to another factor as well, saying clients were distracted by "rapidly evolving, industry-wide cybersecurity concerns" during the quarter, though he offered no further details on what those concerns were or how they affected purchasing decisions. IBM was willing to shoulder some of the blame. "These conditions require our teams to execute perfectly, and this quarter we faltered," Krishna wrote. "We did not adapt and move quickly enough, and numerous large deals failed to close on the timelines we expected, driving the majority of our shortfall." Not everything disappointed. Red Hat revenue grew 11 percent, recent acquisitions including HashiCorp and Confluent performed strongly, and IBM's Distributed Infrastructure business posted record reported growth of 37 percent, driven by Power servers and storage systems. Still, the quarter offers another sign of how the AI infrastructure race is reshaping enterprise IT budgets. For at least one quarter, customers decided the safest investment wasn't the newest mainframe – it was buying as much in-demand hardware as possible before someone else did. ®

Electricity used by datacenters in Ireland increased by 10 percent during 2025, despite an effective moratorium on most new datacenter grid connections in the Dublin area. The latest figures from Ireland's Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that giant server farms now account for nearly a quarter of the country's metered electricity consumption. Their share rose to 23 percent in 2025 after passing 20 percent in 2023 and 14 percent in 2021 – up from just 5 percent way back in 2015. According to the CSO, the energy sucked up by massive bit barns increased by 10 percent last year, expanding from 6,973 gigawatt hours (GWh) in 2024 to 7,663 GWh in 2025. All other customers consumed just 2 percent more electricity over the same period. In fact, datacenters used more electricity than urban households, which accounted for 18 percent of metered use, and more than twice the rural-household share of 9 percent. "Datacenter consumption has grown every single year without exception, more than doubling between 2015 and 2019 from 1,240 GWh to 2,490 GWh, and tripling again between 2019 and 2025, reaching 7,663 GWh," commented Grzegorz Głaczyński, statistician in the CSO's Climate and Energy Division. Things got so bad in Ireland that at one point there were fears that the ever-expanding data dormitories might eat up as much as a third of the Emerald Isle's electricity by now. The Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) put an effective moratorium on connecting new server farms to the electricity grid, at least in the Dublin area, where much of the activity tends to concentrate. This was lifted in December of last year, meaning electricity consumption still rose by a tenth while the moratorium was in place for nearly all of 2025. Under stricter new regulations, server farm operators seeking a grid connection of more than 10 MW must also now provide generators or battery systems capable of providing the same power. They will be required to feed power back to the national grid, if and when required, a system already pioneered by Microsoft and Digital Realty. Like a growing number of places, Ireland has also seen protests against datacenters, which perhaps isn't surprising given that there are understood to be more than 80 of them for a relatively small country of just over 5 million people. Even in the US, the Trump administration is having to work to defuse public opposition to datacenters, asking the tech giants to commit that their expanding server farm estates won't spike energy bills or drain local water supplies across the US. ®

Environmental groups want the FCC to slam the brakes on orbital datacenters, arguing the agency shouldn't approve constellations they say would total more than a million satellites before taking a hard look at their environmental impact. Earthjustice, acting on behalf of DarkSky International, Environment America, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), filed a petition this week urging the regulator to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) before approving any of the pending applications. The filing doesn't target any single company. Instead, it asks the regulator to put the entire emerging orbital datacenter sector on hold while it assesses the cumulative effects of proposals from SpaceX, Starcloud, Blue Origin, Cowboy Space, and any similar applications that follow. According to the petition, those proposals collectively seek "well over a million datacenter satellites" in low Earth orbit. "The FCC is currently considering multiple requests for licensing extraordinary numbers of satellite-based datacenters to be placed into low-earth orbit over the next decade," the petition states. "Collectively, the proposals seek to place well over a million datacenter satellites into orbit, increasing the existing volume of satellites in low-earth orbit by multiple orders of magnitude." The groups argue that the FCC is trying to apply licensing rules written for much smaller satellite constellations to an entirely new class of infrastructure. "If ever a situation warranted a PEIS, it is this one," the petition says. It argues that a single review would allow the agency to examine "the risks, alternatives, needs, costs, and impacts of this sudden transformation of Earth's exosphere" before deciding whether any of the projects are in the public interest. The petition raises concerns about rocket launch emissions, pollutants released as satellites burn up during atmospheric reentry, depletion of the ozone layer, orbital debris, light pollution, impacts on wildlife, and interference with astronomy. It also argues that the combined effects of these constellations cannot be understood by evaluating applications one at a time. "It is difficult to imagine a better example of multiple projects presenting essentially identical impacts and risks that compound synergistically and cumulatively than the present proposals for orbital datacenter constellations," the petition argues. "The FCC's default position that such projects 'individually and cumulatively' have no environmental impact is plainly inapplicable here." The groups also criticize the applicants, saying they make expansive claims about the benefits of orbital computing while offering little detail about its environmental consequences. "The proponents of these proposals describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms," the petition states. "But these same proponents have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self-claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values." The petition arrives as the FCC reconsiders its environmental review rules for satellites, acknowledging that rapid growth in the space industry has raised new questions about how to apply its existing framework. The petition argues that the FCC's current approach, which generally treats satellite licenses as categorically excluded from detailed environmental review, is no longer fit for proposals measured not in dozens or thousands of spacecraft but in hundreds of thousands and, potentially, millions. If the FCC agrees, orbital datacenter operators will have a mountain of paperwork to clear before sending their hardware skyward. ®

Microsoft says it matched its entire electricity consumption with renewable energy last year. The bad news is it also increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 25 percent due to datacenter construction. The cloud and software biz has released a 2026 Environmental Sustainability Report [PDF], claiming its environmental sustainability work is entering a new phase due to rapid technological change. A global shift towards AI is reshaping economies, the report claims, which is becoming “foundational” to how technology is built and used. Producing the infrastructure to support AI, however, is also upping demand for energy, water, land, and materials required to support it, Microsoft admits. The foreword, penned by President Brad Smith and Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa, says that “AI can deliver broad societal, economic, and environmental benefits,” and “We do not see these dynamics as a reason to step back. We see them as a mandate to lead differently.” In 2020, Microsoft set itself the goal of becoming "carbon-negative" by 2030. Its own figures show emissions heading only upwards, from 13 million tons of CO2 equivalent in 2020, to 20 million tons in 2025. However, Microsoft estimates that without the carbon reduction initiatives it has already put in place, emissions would now stand at 34 million tons. We asked Microsoft what this meant for its goal of becoming carbon-negative by 2030. It has yet to reply. As noted previously, Microsoft's rise in GHGs is primarily driven by the expansion of its datacenter infrastructure, though it also points to a decision to stop purchasing non-additional, unbundled renewable energy certificates. The construction spike means that Scope 3 emissions are still the largest part of Microsoft’s carbon footprint, but 2025 saw a growing contribution from Scope 2, due to generation of energy the company purchased. These represent 13 percent of total emissions – up from 2 percent in 2024. This underscores the growing role energy systems play in shaping environmental outcomes and why advancing carbon-free energy sources remains critical to long-term progress, the report says. When it comes to water consumption, another hot topic for those living near to datacenters, Microsoft says it focuses on cooling systems, improving water usage effectiveness (WUE), and reducing reliance on municipal water supplies. It claims the facilities it owns and operates achieved a 25 percent reduction in WUE since the 2022 baseline. The exact figures listed in Microsoft’s Environmental Data Fact Sheet put the company’s total global water withdrawal for 2025 at 13,266 million litres (3,504 million gallons), and total water consumption at 8,170 million litres (2,158 million gallons). For the first time, Microsoft claims to have replenished more than it withdrew during 2025, returning 14,278 million liters (3,771 million gallons). Elsewhere, the corporation says its Circular Centers program reused 92 percent of decommissioned servers and their components. In the past, Microsoft said it tried to cut the emissions from building datacenters by using concrete mixes with lower overall embodied carbon, and it experimented with facilities made out of wood, estimated to produce a carbon footprint 65 percent lower. ®

ON CALL The 2026 FIFA World Cup continues and at the time of writing, The Register's home nation – England – remains in with a chance to bring home the trophy! We therefore devote this week's edition of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support, to the beautiful game. We're able to do so thanks to a reader we'll Regomize as "George" who once pulled off a great save when, decades ago, he worked as one half of the two-person tech team at one of Europe's most famous football clubs. "The IT manager wouldn't work weekends," George told On Call, and that meant he had to attend most home games to provide tech support. "Mostly I'd be paid overtime to sit around in the police control room for a few hours, eat free pies, and pretend I was vital to operations," George wrote. "Occasionally, a minor issue would require my input, but typically it was a quiet day spent watching the match in comfort." The club George worked for enjoys an ancient and enormously fierce rivalry with another. When the two teams meet, it's a major event, authorities insist on extra security, and police brace for trouble across an entire city. That caution extends into the club's stadium. "The club would hand over overall responsibility for stadium safety to a suitable deputy chief constable for the duration of the game," George explained. "That officer had the ultimate say on whether the match would go ahead in the case of any safety issues." On the day in question, power to the police control room suddenly went out – just as the ground started filling for the big match. "This was a major issue. We had no radio to coordinate hundreds of stewards and police officers, no CCTV monitoring stations, and most critically, no exit gate control – an essential requirement for acceptable match day safety," George told On Call. Club officials therefore dispatched an electrician to sort things out, but the sparky soon returned with bad news: a recent upgrade had burned out, and a fix would take days. On most match days, the outage would mean immediate cancellation of the match - and a big fine for the club for failing to stage the game. But with a fevered crowd flooding in from the streets near the stadium, calling off the match had the potential to see frothing fans turn ugly. The officer in charge and the stadium operations director therefore entered had a terse discussion, during which they asked the electrician if a portable generator might address the problem – but that wasn't possible. At this point, George asked the officer in charge what minimum setup would make it safe to let the game proceed. "The response was that if we could centrally open the exit gates at the end of the match, or in the event of an evacuation, and get the CCTV and radio working, the match could go ahead." George then revealed that he had just that week installed a new 4U uninterruptible power supply (UPS) in the football club's server room and had been charging it ever since. (In case any tech-averse football fans stumble upon this story, a UPS is a substantial battery used to keep critical computers running when power drops out. They store plenty of energy, but nobody assumes they'll last for hours.) George felt the UPS unit might do the job. "After some quick napkin math, I suggested it might have enough juice to power those critical systems for long enough to allow the match to proceed," he wrote. The police officer and operations director agreed to let George try to make it work. "I rounded up a few lingering stewards, the electrician, and two uniformed coppers, and we set off to the server room. We retrieved the UPS and humped the massive bloody thing halfway round the stadium, through the crowds, and up the tight stairwell into the control room." George then jury-rigged extension cables to the systems that needed power and turned them on. "I felt like Tom Hanks trying to get that guidance computer online in Apollo 13," he told On Call. "Amazingly, everything actually came up and stayed up, the UPS's extremely vague five LED capacity lights held solid at full green and the order was given for the match to proceed," George said. He spent the entirety of the match staring at those LEDs, and as the match progressed, he started praying it would not go too deep into stoppage time. "The final whistle blew, we opened the gates, and the UPS lasted another 10 minutes before finally conking out," he told The Register. "For my MacGyveresque efforts, saving the high-stakes match, protecting the safety of tens of thousands of fans, and saving the club a fortune in fines, I was duly awarded a gift voucher to be spent at the club's on-site superstore," George told On Call. "The value of the voucher was not even enough to buy myself a single home-team shirt." Adding insult to injury, when he checked his next payslip, George realized the club had counted the value of the voucher as additional income, and he had therefore paid tax on it. Have you saved a big event or MacGyvered a tech support fix? If so, click here to send your story to On Call. We'd love the chance to steer it into the back of the net on a future Friday. ®