IRELAND’S LARGEST DATA centres used close to one billion litres of water last year, a new investigation by The Journal Investigates has found.
In total, at least 1.7 billion litres of water have been used by data centres from the public supply over the past two years.
A government study from 2022 suggested that data centres used roughly 810 million litres of water a year.
At least 1.7 billion litres of water has been used by data centres connected to the public water supply since 2024, according to figures examined by our team.
They added that “modern data centres use relatively small volumes of water” and that “not all data centres use water from the Uisce Éireann network.”.
Over four billion litres of water were used from the public supply by these pharmaceutical giants in the last two years – more than double that of Ireland’s data centres.
Pfizer’s plant in Grange Castle, which is surrounded by a cluster of data centres in south-west Dublin, used 1.2 billion litres of water in the last two years, matched only by Meta’s data centre campus. »