The United Kingdom is facing one of its worst droughts in decades, so it is reaching for a high-tech way for citizens to save water: deleting their old emails. In a press release posted on Tuesday after the National Drought Group met to discuss solutions, the U.K. government wrote that citizens should “delete old emails and pictures as data centers require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.” One estimate says that a large data center can “drink” up to five million gallons of water per day, equivalent to the total water use of a 50,000-person town. Thus, Brits are being asked to slim down their inboxes as shipping, farming, and fishing are all being adversely affected by low water levels in major rivers. Frighteningly, the water-usage problem is likely to become even more acute as data centers spring up to power AI chatbots: in the U.S., AI queries already consume more than one and a half Olympic-sized swimming pools of water every day. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to make the country a “world leader” in artificial intelligence.
