Artificial intelligence has become a major focus for global water and energy, bringing significant new demands while offering tools to improve water management, a report from the UAE Foreign Ministry has said.
The report, Crosscurrents: Navigating the AI-Water-Energy Nexus, highlights that integrated planning and governance are essential to ensuring the technology advances sustainably without contributing to water scarcity.
"The extraordinary rise of artificial intelligence has brought with it a paradigm shift in both the nature of the global water crisis and our ability to address it," Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, said in the executive summary of the report.
Sheikh Abdullah said that as water scarcity intensifies alongside the expansion of AI, governments and industry must manage water, energy and digital infrastructure as a single interconnected system.
The report maps water use across the AI value chain, including semiconductor manufacturing, electricity generation and cooling infrastructure, while also emphasising that indirect water use, particularly in power generation and chip production, often exceeds direct consumption at data centres themselves.
It added that policymakers have overlooked the implications of the effect of AI's rapid expansion on resources. Data centre water use is projected to about double by 2030, reaching 9.32 trillion litres.
In January, the UN said that parts of the world have entered water bankruptcy, meaning depletion that cannot realistically be reversed.
The report also highlights that a key constraint on future AI growth is political. Using examples from the US, Malaysia, Chile and Ireland, the report points to how community concerns about water access, electricity demands and other issues are delaying or reshaping large data centre projects.
To address these concerns, the report highlights significant opportunities for AI to improve water management. It points to projects in the UAE, such as MaiWater, that have integrated AI with renewable energy and water planning, including advanced data centre cooling and strategic water storage.
"AI is opening possibilities that could scarcely have been imagined only a few years ago," Sheikh Abdullah said. "Used wisely, it could help us solve one of humanity’s oldest and most fundamental challenges: ensuring safe and reliable access to water for all."
The report gives five recommendations for future AI development: establishing international co-operation on responsible AI water use; integrating AI infrastructure into water and energy planning; requiring transparent resource-use reporting; promoting low-water and low-energy technologies; and embedding water and climate risk into corporate strategy.
"The priority is integrated governance: planning water, energy, infrastructure, and data as mutually dependent systems," the report says.
The UAE and Senegal will host the 2026 UN Water Conference in Abu Dhabi in December. The report called the event a "premier opportunity to turn responsible AI development into a shared global agenda".
