With water woes looming on the horizon, Reliance’s Jio Platforms has provide you with an modern methodology of utilizing seawater for cooling its data centres and addressing sustainability considerations in India.
The urgency is clear. Data centres consumed round 150 billion litres of water in 2025, a determine set to greater than double by 2030. A single 100 MW facility utilizing standard cooling can draw roughly two million litres a day, most of it evaporated quite than returned, based on Greyhound Analysis.
Jio plans to energy its newest 168 MW data centre at Jamnagar in Gujarat utilizing the simply accessible seawater quite than freshwater, the most recent pivot in direction of sustainable efforts within the data ecosystem.
“The data centre will probably be powered by renewable power and cooled with desalinated seawater, demonstrating each RIL’s and Meta’s dedication to sustainability,” mentioned Jio in its announcement.
Praising the transfer, Greyhound Analysis in its analysis notice mentioned, “The usage of desalinated seawater is much extra smart than drawing closely on harassed municipal freshwater methods, and coastal siting carries real benefits the place renewable power, submarine cable adjacency and industrial land might be introduced collectively. Nevertheless, it requires power, consumption methods, creates brine and discharge questions that demand native ecological governance. It should be measured, reported and audited quite than wrapped in a inexperienced ribbon and waved via.”
Whereas the most recent improvement within the sustainability matter, the scrutiny in direction of cooling strategies is just not restricted to Jio. Different main data centres in India have additionally been engaged on alternate means to chill their buildings with out stressing current pure assets.
For instance, Yotta Data Companies data centres focus totally on air-cooling with tens of chillers put in on the terrace and closed-loop water-pipes operating alongside each data centre ground to manage the system.
“As soon as in six months, now we have to top-up the closed-water however even that’s minimal. It’s mentioned that round 50 MW consumes solely as a lot water in a 12 months as a restaurant will devour in a 12 months,” mentioned Sunil Gupta, Founding father of Yotta Data Companies.
ESDS too plans to transition their Indian data centres away from purely water-based cooling in direction of different strategies. Notably for its Mumbai facility, ESDS is utilizing a “absolutely closed-loop water-cooled system” that repeatedly recirculates the identical water.
“Recent-water draw is proscribed to minor make-up — about 2,500 to three,000 litres a 12 months for all the facility. Being a sealed, near-zero-loss loop, it avoids the heavy evaporative losses of open cooling towers, holding our annual consumption a tiny fraction of a comparable standard facility. Water stewardship is tracked as a core ESG metric alongside power and carbon,” mentioned Ashok Pomnar, Senior Vice President, ESDS. This system helps the plant at its best level whereas sustaining a 1.5 Energy Utilization Effectiveness (PUE).
Other than these native gamers, worldwide gamers like Amazon Internet Companies (AWS) instructed businessline about their plans to take a position greater than ₹42 crore ($4.3 million) in water replenishment efforts throughout India to revive over 3 billion litres of water yearly.
“We additionally don’t use water when cooling our data centres. Our ambient DC temperature will probably be barely greater than a few of the others however we offer nonetheless optimum output in the case of providers,” mentioned Sandeep Dutta, President, AWS India and South Asia.
5 years in the past, Sify Applied sciences famous India’s place as a water-stressed nation and standardized on air-cooled closed-loop chiller know-how throughout its data centre portfolio. By eradicating cooling water dependency, Sify improved operational resilience and lowered publicity to water shortages, drought circumstances, provide disruptions, regulatory restrictions and escalating water prices. This strategy additionally aligns with the rising business give attention to Water Utilization Effectiveness (WUE). The way forward for data centres will probably be outlined not solely by how effectively they use energy, but in addition by how responsibly they use water, as per Sify.
Water woes
Regardless of the efforts introduced by large gamers, water utilization is a significant concern in India. With cities already going through water issues, credit standing corporations like Moody’s Scores have flagged severe water stress in India amidst rising data centre demand.In a latest report, it famous that India has a fragmented water governance construction, extremely subsidised pricing and gradual reallocation amongst sectors. In such a backdrop, the fast development of the DC ecosystem, pushed by the growth of cloud computing and AI, will add additional water-intensive industrial strain that governments and utilities will more and more must accommodate.
In reality, “water” has now reached parity with energy because the defining constraint on India’s data centre ambition, as per Greyhound Analysis. Whereas water-cooling entails extra upkeep strain, air-cooling raises price operations and carbon depth. With the El Nino phenomenon anticipated to adversely have an effect on India’s monsoons and groundwater ranges, stakeholders should take a better have a look at the redistribution and utilization of current freshwater within the nation.
Revealed on June 23, 2026
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