AI's hidden water footprint may have reached 765 billion litres in 2025 — consumed in data-centre cooling and the power plants supplying them. That's more than twice the volume of bottled water the entire world buys in a year

AI feels almost weightless when it arrives through a browser. A prompt goes in, an answer comes back, and the machinery doing the work remains out of sight. A 2025 analysis tried to make part of that machinery visible. It estimated that AI systems could have …