The Coming Water Wars: Technology’s Unseen Role in a Growing Crisis

As a lifelong security professional and defense analyst, I have spent and continue to spend my life scanning the horizon for threats – whether to my clients, my country or humanity. Most dangers come and go, some can be mitigated. Others must simply be avoided altogether. Yet one potential risk has stayed with me since my early teens. A holy man I was introduced to as a teenager in India warned that one day wars would be fought over water. I was skeptical at the time, to say the least, but the seed was planted. And for the past 25 years, I have been searching for the catalyst that might turn this prediction into reality. I am now convinced I have found it: artificial intelligence and its unquenchable thirst for clean water.

And for decades the United Nations has warned that water shortage could become one of the greatest drivers of conflict in the twenty-first century. As former World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin starkly predicted: “Many of the wars of this century were about oil, but wars of the next century will be about water.” Until recently these warnings focused on familiar pressures – climate change, population growth and mismanagement. But a new and less visible force is now accelerating the crisis: the vast, unquenchable thirst of modern technology. Data centers supporting artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies and the broader digital economy are consuming water on an unprecedented scale. As the technological infrastructure of the future expands, it risks tipping already fragile water systems past the point of recovery with serious consequences for global peace and security.

Technology’s Growing Demand for Water

Water is indispensable to modern technological infrastructure. High-performance data centers require massive amounts of water to cool the servers that sustain digital processes. In the US  alone data centers consumed an estimated 626 billion liters of water in 2021, with projections indicating a sharp rise as AI models grow larger and demand ever more computational power. Training a single large AI model can require the same amount of water as manufacturing hundreds of automobiles.

Yet this immense demand remains largely hidden from public view.

The rise of cryptocurrencies intensifies the problem: Bitcoin mining alone consumes colossal quantities of electricity and indirectly drives high water usage by increasing the load on power plants and cooling systems. Estimates suggest that crypto mining operations contribute millions of liters of water withdrawals annually, often concentrated in regions already suffering from severe water stress. Unlike traditional industries, tech-driven water use is scattered, private and largely unregulated making it harder to monitor and even harder to manage.

Regional Impact and Emerging Tensions

The consequences are particularly severe in water-scarce regions. In the American Southwest, tech giants have constructed vast server farms that draw from the same groundwater reserves relied upon by farmers and local communities. In Europe, protests have erupted over the environmental costs of hosting data centers in regions facing drought conditions. In parts of Africa and Asia, where water insecurity is already a source of friction, the additional pressure from digital infrastructure risks becoming a destabilizing factor.

Historically water shortage has been a slow-moving crisis evident by the gradual erosion of agricultural viability, rural livelihoods and regional stability. The silent, accelerating drawdown caused by digital technologies could fundamentally alter the speed and scale of this decline. Conflicts over water have often been localized but as major global industries come to depend on colossal and reliable water supplies the competition may become transnational and corporate, complicating traditional notions of state sovereignty and international law.

Policy Responses and Their Limitations

Governments are beginning to take notice. Some US states have introduced limited regulations requiring data centers to disclose water usage and explore more efficient cooling systems. The Netherlands, facing significant public opposition, has placed temporary restrictions on new data center construction pending environmental review. However, such responses remain fragmented and reactive compared to the explosive growth of AI and blockchain industries.

Meanwhile the broader forecasts are grim. The United Nations predicts that by 2030, global demand for freshwater will exceed sustainable supply by 40%. Climate change acts as a force multiplier, exacerbating droughts, reducing river flows and accelerating groundwater depletion. Against this backdrop, the unchecked thirst of modern technologies could serve as the final tipping point toward widespread instability.

Strategic Implications

The security implications are profound. Scarcity worsens inequality and inequality breeds instability and instability invites conflict. These dynamics are well documented, but technology introduces a new layer of complexity. Where past water conflicts have been driven by agricultural needs, municipal demand and territorial control, future tensions may involve multinational corporations, decentralized crypto networks and the necessities of maintaining global digital systems.

There is an enduring hope that technology will eventually solve the problems it creates. Advocates of AI-driven efficiency argue that smarter systems, better recycling methods and more sustainable designs will mitigate water usage. Yet for now, these solutions remain largely aspirational. The infrastructure is expanding faster than mitigation strategies can be deployed and the invisible costs are mounting. And in the wise words of JRR Tolkien “Do not trust to hope.”

Each query to an AI system, each blockchain transaction, each streamed video, carries with it a hidden price paid in freshwater – a resource far more limited, far more irreplaceable, than most seem to realize or care.

Conclusion

If past centuries were defined by struggles for oil, the coming decades may be marked by battles over water. Technological progress has brought extraordinary advances, yet it has also introduced hidden costs that strain the very foundations of human life. As AI systems grow larger, as cryptocurrencies spread and as data centers multiply, the silent competition for freshwater resources will only intensify. Governments, industries and societies may soon find themselves meeting an uncomfortable reality: the greatest battles of the future may not be fought for territory or ideology, but for the control of the most basic resource of all, life sustaining water.