While 10 million UK citizens face hosepipe bans during summer heatwaves, data centres classified as critical national infrastructure are not subject to the same restrictions — and poor data quality means those centres are burning through more water than they should.
The UK government's decision to designate data centres as critical national infrastructure means hosepipe bans and non-essential water use restrictions fall only on the general public. Cooling systems at those sites draw substantial water volumes regardless of what is happening outside.
Matt Waxman, chief product officer at Precisely, has pointed to a compounding factor: AI models trained on poor data require more compute cycles, more reruns, and more cooling to arrive at outputs that reliable data would have produced faster.
"Every AI workflow, whether human or agent driven, starts with the same question: is the data it is running on trustworthy?" Waxman said. "Not because it is a nice-to-have, because when someone acts on bad data, they do not know the data is bad, and so neither does the compute behind it."
The argument is about wasted cycles, not just bad decisions. When an AI system runs on inaccurate or incomplete data, the model does not flag the problem — it consumes energy and water pursuing a wrong answer with full confidence. At the scale enterprise AI now operates, Waxman said, that silent failure accumulates into something measurable.
"The waste is not just bad decisions. It is the resources consumed in confident pursuit of the wrong answer," he said. "Well-structured, high-quality data leads to faster convergence, fewer reruns, consistent outputs. That is the efficiency argument most enterprises are already making."
The data quality case has long been framed as an operational argument: bad inputs produce bad outputs. The environmental dimension is newer. As organisations scale agentic AI systems, the resource cost of poor data management now extends beyond compute bills and into water tables and energy grids that citizens also depend on.
Precisely provides data integrity software to large enterprises. The company's comments arrive as water stress in the UK south east has risen sharply, with the Environment Agency reporting that parts of England face their worst water availability in 130 years.
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