AI infrastructure water consumption has moved from sustainability-footnote to procurement-deck variable: Google reported 8.1 billion gallons of data-centre water consumption in 2024 (a 33% year-over-year increase from 6.1 billion in 2023), Microsoft reported 6.4 million cubic metres in 2022 at a Water Usage Effectiveness of 0.30 litres per kilowatt-hour (a 39% improvement from 0.49 in 2021), and the EU Energy Efficiency Directive 2023/1791 made WUE and water-consumption reporting mandatory for data centres above 500 kilowatts of IT power demand starting 15 September 2024. Closed-loop and immersion cooling technologies (Microsoft's zero-water evaporation systems standardised for new builds August 2024; immersion cooling at sub-1.1 PUE) have matured enough that the procurement question for cloud and co-location vendors in 2026 is the vendor's water-efficiency posture in writing, not whether water consumption is a procurement-relevant variable.

Claim created at publish; review on 60-day cadence. Anchor sources: Google 2024 Environmental Report (8.1B gallons figure, 33% YoY, Council Bluffs facility detail); Microsoft Sustainability Report (6.4M m^3 2022, 34% YoY; WUE 0.30 L/kWh; 42% from water-stressed regions); UC Riverside Shaolei Ren published research on GPT-3 training water consumption (700K litres direct, 5.4M total) and per-conversation framing; Microsoft zero-water-evaporation cooling launch (August 2024); EU Energy Efficiency Directive (EU) 2023/1791, Annex VII reporting requirements; Singapore WUE ≤2.0 m^3/MWh requirement; Meta Hyperion Louisiana 5 GW capacity announcement. Sister claims: AM-007 (vendor-response split — same Cohort A/B framing applies to sustainability disclosure), AM-130 (procurement-reader four evidence classes), AM-140 (procurement-committee six pre-pilot questions; this claim adds a sustainability-disclosure question), AM-009 (Anthropic Cohort A disclosure pattern as the cross-domain analogy). Trigger conditions to revisit before next cadence: (a) a major hyperscaler (Google, Microsoft, AWS, Meta) reporting a year-over-year decrease in absolute water consumption against rising AI workload; (b) EU Member State enforcement action under Directive 2023/1791 setting reporting precedent; (c) a published cooling-technology benchmark showing sub-1.05 PUE at production scale beyond the current immersion-cooling pilots; (d) a major regulatory regime (US, UK, China) establishing a parallel mandatory reporting framework.