UAE Report Urges Countries to Plan for AI’s Growing Water and Energy Demand
Its recommendations include requiring reporting of AI’s direct and indirect water and energy use and building AI facilities into water and energy planning.
- By Danielle Naidu
- October 16, 2026
Water, energy and digital infrastructure should be planned as a single system, according to a report the United Arab Emirates released ahead of the 2026 U.N. Water Conference it will co-host with Senegal in Abu Dhabi in December.
Data centers worldwide are projected to use about twice as much water in 2030 as in 2025, reaching 9.32 trillion liters, and AI’s share of that total is expected to quadruple, the report says. Most of that water is used not at data centers but in the supply chain behind them, at power plants and chip fabrication plants.
Efficiency gains won’t be enough on their own, the report argues. Every decision about cooling and energy involves a trade-off between water and power, and as computing costs fall, resource use tends to rise. Community concerns and permitting decisions are also increasingly shaping where AI facilities can be built.
The report makes five recommendations. It suggests using the conference to build shared understanding among countries, with a voluntary declaration by willing countries on efficient resource use in AI as one possible outcome. It also recommends folding AI facilities into water and energy plans at both the national and basin level, and requiring transparent, comparable reports on both direct and indirect water and energy use. The remaining two call for encouraging technologies that use less water and energy, circular resource systems and AI tools for water, and for companies to build water and climate risk into their strategy, site selection and investments.
AI can also help manage water, the report says. Dozens of studies put the accuracy of AI-enhanced leak detection at 95% to 99%, though system-wide results still come mostly from pilot projects.
The UAE’s Permanent Mission to the U.N. prepared the report, Crosscurrents: Navigating the AI-Water-Energy Nexus, with analysis from Eurasia Group. It follows the UAE’s 2023 Ripple Effect report on water scarcity. The full report is available from the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
