2026 Data Center Trend Forecast Series – Part 3 of 4
The year 2026 is no longer just about buildings filled with servers. We are witnessing a total transformation in cooling architecture. The industry’s focus is shifting from merely Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) to Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE). This article will discuss how new technologies are breaking the myth that AI must always be water-intensive, especially in tropical climates.
Does AI Really Use Too Much Water?
Throughout 2024 and 2025, media narratives often highlighted how water-intensive AI is. Headlines frequently stated that “one chatbot conversation is equivalent to wasting a bottle of water.” However, it’s important to understand the physics behind these claims.
In conventional data center designs, heat is dissipated through cooling towers. These systems work by evaporating water into the atmosphere to remove heat. In this old model, the harder chips work (to train AI models), the more heat is generated, and the more water has to be evaporated. A report from researchers at the University of California estimated that training GPT-3 alone consumed thousands of liters of water.
However, in 2026, this linear correlation between “high performance” and “water waste” is starting to break. The data center industry is moving away from open evaporation methods in favor of much more sophisticated closed-loop technologies. Used water is not discarded but recycled for reuse.
Tropical Challenge: When the Air is Already Too Humid
The shift to the Asia Pacific region (as discussed in Part 2) brings its own technical challenges. Countries like Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines have very high levels of air humidity.
Traditional evaporative cooling systems work very inefficiently in tropical areas. You cannot effectively cool water by evaporating it into air that is already saturated with water (humid). As a result, data center operators often have to expend more energy and water just to keep server temperatures stable.
This is what is driving the birth of a new standard in 2026: Membrane Technology.
The Rise of Membrane Liquid Cooling
To overcome the “heat trap” in tropical regions without depleting local groundwater reserves, new technologies such as liquid cooling systems are becoming standard for forward-thinking operators.
Unlike traditional cooling towers that spray water into the air, these systems use semi-permeable membranes—imagine a giant Gore-Tex layer for data centers. This technology separates water from the airflow. The membrane allows heat to escape through microscopic water vapor but retains liquid water to prevent it from being wasted and prevents contaminants from outside air from entering the system.
The results are very significant for the 2026 sustainability trend:
- Water Savings: Membrane technology can cut water usage by up to 90% compared to conventional systems.
- Tropical Efficiency: This system continues to work optimally in high-humidity environments, making it an ideal solution for the Southeast Asian market.
The implementation of this technology is no longer just theory. Regional digital infrastructure companies like Digital Edge have begun implementing liquid cooling technology in their facilities, such as in Indonesia and the Philippines, to prove that high density can be achieved in tropical climates without sacrificing water efficiency. This is a real example of how physical innovation enables AI expansion in areas previously considered too hot or humid.
Towards Zero WUE: A New Sustainability Standard
In 2026, hyperscale clients (giant technology companies) will no longer just ask, “What is your electrical capacity?” but also “What is your WUE number?”
Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) is becoming as important a metric as PUE. In many countries, permits for new data center construction are increasingly restricted regarding groundwater use, especially as data centers often compete with the clean water needs of surrounding communities.
The data center architecture of the future will be “hybrid.” On the roof, membrane systems (such as liquid cooling) create a closed cold-water cycle. Inside the server room (data hall), this cold water is directed to two destinations:
- Fan Walls: To cool standard cloud servers.
- Direct-to-Chip (DTC): Cooling plates attached directly to high-power AI chips (such as Nvidia Blackwell or Rubin architectures that have a Thermal Design Power above 1000W).
This combination allows data centers to handle very heavy AI workloads with a near-zero water footprint.
Conclusion
The physical transformation of data centers in 2026 is about becoming “environmentally invisible,” so that data centers will not affect their surrounding environment. The main trend is to decouple computing growth from natural resource consumption.
The future of AI infrastructure is not about finding more water to dissipate into the atmosphere, but rather engineering systems so that such waste is eliminated entirely. With the adoption of membrane-based cooling technology and liquid cooling, data centers in 2026 will be quiet, cool, and water-efficient utilities, ready to support the global artificial intelligence revolution.
