Vantage Data Centers’ Richard Haigh on the Truth About Power & Water : Data Centre LIVE 2026

Our Take

Worth noting up front: this is a fireside chat at an industry trade show, filmed by a trade publication, featuring an operator explaining why concerns about his own company's resource footprint are overblown. That's not journalism, it's marketing with a Q&A format — and Data Centre Magazine deserves credit for at least putting the clip online where the rest of us can pick it apart. The Section 106 reference and 'EMEA' title make clear this is UK-specific planning law, so don't assume the same obligations or numbers apply to a campus going up in Virginia, Georgia, or Arizona.

The closed-loop pitch — fill the pipes once, recirculate for 25 years, use no more mains water than five households — is a real technology and it does exist at some sites. But 'closed-loop' isn't a magic word that ends the conversation. It still requires an initial fill, blowdown and makeup water on some designs, cooling towers at other sites that evaporate water continuously, and enormous amounts of electricity to run the chillers and pumps in the first place — electricity that in the US mostly still comes from a grid burning gas and coal, with its own water footprint upstream at the power plant. 'We don't take your water' is a much easier claim to make than 'here's our actual annual water withdrawal, our cooling design, and our independently audited numbers, published for every site.'

The real test isn't what an operator says on a conference stage, it's what's written into the interconnection agreement, the water permit, and the tax abatement deal that local officials actually signed. Those documents are public in most states, and they're where the real story — and the real leverage residents have — lives. Check our facility map to see what's proposed or under construction near you, and hit take-action for how to get the actual permits and agreements pulled before the next hearing, not the highlight reel.