For most of the past century, water has been treated as a background input – cheap, local and largely taken for granted. That assumption no longer holds.
As data centres scale to meet the demands of AI and cloud computing, the sector is confronting a resource constraint that cannot be engineered away without a deliberate strategy.
Emilio Tenuta, Senior Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer at Ecolab, has spent decades building the case that operational performance and environmental stewardship are not mutually exclusive. In the context of data centres, he contends that managing water is no longer a matter of compliance. Instead, it is a business imperative and can even be a competitive differentiator.
Data centre growth is colliding with real resource limits
Ecolab operates across virtually every industry, providing water, hygiene, infection prevention and resource management solutions to customers worldwide. Its positioning spans science, data and operational services – meaning it sits close to many of the sector’s most pressing infrastructure challenges. Emilio’s role spans that breadth, with sustainability embedded into business strategy rather than treated as a separate function.
Emilio’s assessment of the data centre sector identifies a clear bottleneck.
“The core challenge is simple,” he says. “Data centre growth is colliding with real resource limits, especially energy and water. As power demand rises, it often increases upstream water impact. At the same time, AI and high-density computing are driving much higher heat loads, which can quickly raise cooling intensity and water use if they’re not managed well.”
The scale of the problem is only escalating. Emilio points to projections showing that by 2030, AI is expected to consume power comparable to the electricity demands of India, and water equivalent to the annual drinking water needs of the entire United States. Those are not margins for negotiation.
Yet Emilio frames this not as a ceiling on growth but as a design problem. “The opportunity is that this doesn’t have to slow growth,” he says. “With smarter cooling design, real-time monitoring, and continuous optimisation, operators can decouple growth from resource use. When done right, it improves uptime, efficiency and cost performance all at once.”
Water stress is now a site selection and licence-to-operate issue
The geography of data centre development has shifted faster than many operators anticipated.
Since 2022, roughly two-thirds of new capacity has been added in water-stressed regions and approximately 40% of existing facilities already face water stress exposure. Looking further ahead, nearly a third of data centres currently under construction are in areas projected to face greater water scarcity by 2050.
The consequences extend beyond operational efficiency. Water availability now directly shapes where facilities can be built and whether communities will accept them.
“Water availability and reliability now influence site selection, operational resilience, regulatory exposure and community trust,” Emilio says. “That tight link between energy and water is why communities are increasingly viewing data centre growth as a licence-to-operate issue.”
This shift in how water is perceived at the board level has been years in the making. “For a long time, water was treated as a low-cost, abundant operational input, managed locally, reported on, but rarely elevated to the C-suite,” Emilio says. “That view has fundamentally changed. Water is now firmly part of the core business conversation, recognised as a strategic imperative and a material risk on par with energy and climate.”
Companies are now seeing how water stress, flooding and declining water quality can disrupt operations, constrain growth and increase costs. In sectors that depend on uninterrupted uptime, those are not risks to be taken lightly. Leading operators, Emilio points out, have already moved beyond compliance.
“The key shift is that water is no longer just about stewardship,” he says. “It’s about protecting performance, enabling growth and reducing business risk in an increasingly resource-constrained world.”
AI-enabled water management tools drive operational performance
Ecolab’s response to these pressures sits across two connected product areas.
The first is Ecolab® Water Navigator IQ™, an AI-enabled platform that quantifies risk in financial terms and integrates leading datasets to provide a single, enterprise-wide view of a company’s water management plans. For industry and data centres, the tool turns data into insights to drive action at the local level.
“It starts with a clear assessment, giving operators visibility into their local water stress exposure and the water management strategies needed to operate reliably in constrained environments,” Emilio explains. “From there, Water Navigator IQ provides real-time insights into water risk, localised water valuation and predictive analytics, helping leaders make faster, more informed investment decisions.”
The second area addresses the cooling side of the equation, where AI workloads are generating heat loads that legacy systems were not designed to handle. Ecolab’s 3D TRASAR™ Technology for direct-to-chip liquid cooling is positioned as a response to that challenge. By combining real-time monitoring with AI-driven insights, the system is designed to protect servers and reduce both water and energy consumption simultaneously.
“Together, these solutions allow Ecolab to support the entire data centre cooling ecosystem, from cooling towers to the chip level,” Emilio says. “It’s about helping operators do more with less, improving uptime and efficiency while safeguarding water and energy resources.”
The overarching goal, as Emilio frames it, is straightforward: “Protect operational continuity today while enabling confident, profitable growth tomorrow.”
Industry partnerships enable water efficiency benchmarking at scale
Individual operator performance matters, but Emilio is clear that water scarcity is a shared local challenge that companies cannot address in isolation. That conviction underpins Ecolab’s engagement in water partnerships designed to create common metrics and enable collective action.
One example is a partnership with CDP and the launch of the Water Use Efficiency Index, a tool that allows data centre operators to compare water performance across facilities in the same region on a consistent basis. “By combining CDP’s disclosure data with Ecolab’s water expertise, companies can see how they stack up against peers and best-in-class performance and identify practical ways to improve efficiency, reliability and cost,” Emilio says.
At a broader level, the Water Resilience Coalition, which Ecolab co-founded, illustrates what coordinated action looks like at scale. Forty-two companies representing approximately US$5tn in market value are working together across 100 priority basins, with an impact touching more than three billion people. The coalition is designed to produce measurable, sustainable change.
“Partnerships create scale, speed and credibility – and they’re essential to addressing water scarcity while supporting long-term business performance,” Emilio says. “Progress depends on collaboration, common metrics and turning data into action.”
Sustainability as a catalyst for resilience and long-term value creation
Emilio’s broader argument is that sustainability, when integrated properly into business strategy, does not constrain performance – it strengthens it. His framing of the role of Chief Sustainability Officer is explicitly that of a change agent rather than a compliance function. The shift he is trying to drive is from reactive resource management to predictive, performance-driven operations.
That means deploying smart technology, circular water strategies and nature-based solutions not as separate sustainability initiatives but as components of a broader strategy. The Water Use Efficiency Index, in this model, is a mechanism for moving every site towards best-in-class operations with direct links to business outcomes.
For the data centre sector, this matters because the pressure is structural. AI workloads will not become less water-intensive on their own. The regions where capacity is being built will not become less water-stressed by default. The question is whether operators approach those constraints as fixed costs or as design parameters to be optimised.
“The companies that will lead are those that deliver best-in-class performance while using fewer resources consistently and at scale,” Emilio says. “The future is clear: decoupling growth from resource intensity.
“When powered by digital and AI, sustainability becomes a catalyst for resilience, profitability and long-term value.”
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Emilio Tenuta
Senior Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer at Ecolab