Reflections on Power, Diplomacy, and Strategic Foresight

Reflections on Water, Power, and the Digital Frontier

By José Parejo, Founding Partner, José Parejo & Associates

Empires do not fail when they lose battles.

From Mesopotamia’s canals to the Nile’s annual floods, every civilization has rested on a hydraulic foundation. Karl Wittfogel called them “hydraulic empires”—societies organized around the management of rivers and aquifers. Fernand Braudel would add that water is not an event but a structure: the quiet, enduring geography upon which economies rise or collapse.

Today, we face a paradox that few corporate boardrooms recognize. The infrastructure of the digital age—the server farms that host our data, power our AI, and secure our transactions—is colliding with the same limits that once humbled empires. Not oil, not semiconductors, but water.

The Arithmetic Behind the Illusion

The illusion is that the digital economy is immaterial, a weightless cloud. Yet a hyperscale data campus can consume 6–10 million liters of water per day, equivalent to the needs of a city of 50,000 people.

• Arizona: Microsoft disclosed annual use of 1.7 million cubic meters—over 660 Olympic pools—at a time when the Colorado River crisis has forced farmers into permanent cutbacks.

• Ireland: Data centres already account for 18 % of the national electricity grid; regulators warn that water shortages will make further growth unsustainable by 2026.

• Spain: Madrid is on track to attract €7 billion in data-centre investment by 2026, even as climate models project 30 % less rainfall in central regions by mid-century.

• Netherlands: Facebook’s Zeewolde project was cancelled in 2022 after citizens protested the diversion of land and water.

• Chile: Google secured rights to pump 169 liters per second from stressed aquifers near Santiago, sparking public outrage in drought-stricken communities.

• South Africa: Johannesburg’s 2021 water crisis forced rolling restrictions while new server facilities sought permits.

Global estimates suggest that cloud and AI services may consume 10 % of total freshwater resources in some regions by 2030 if current trajectories hold.

Historical Echoes

Herodotus wrote that Egypt was “the gift of the Nile.” The Roman Empire built aqueducts not as luxuries, but as lifelines. Ibn Khaldun warned that civilizations collapse when they exhaust the resources that sustain them.

The parallels are structural. For Egypt, the ceiling was the flood cycle of the Nile. For Mesopotamia, it was the salinisation of canals that eventually reduced harvests. For medieval Spain, droughts often triggered waves of famine and political instability.

Today, the ceiling is water itself. Not maritime routes, but aquifers and reservoirs—limits that determine where the digital economy can expand, and where it will falter.

The New Geography of Risk

What is unfolding is not local scarcity, but a new map of digital risk:

• Europe: Ireland has paused licenses; the Netherlands has cancelled projects; Spain faces rising tension between climate projections and data-centre expansion.

• Asia: Singapore froze permits; China has restricted construction in Hebei after aquifers fell by 100 meters in two decades.

• Americas: Arizona, Utah, and Nevada face conflicts between farms and servers. In Chile, water rights for tech campuses have become a political flashpoint.

The question for corporations is not “where is connectivity fastest?” but “where is water legitimate?” Licenses, protests, and politics are already shaping the map of the digital economy.

Corporate Blind Spots

Fortune 500 balance sheets can absorb write-downs. Insurance can cover assets. But no insurance policy restores lost time, lost market share, or lost legitimacy.

• In Zeewolde, Facebook forfeited years of planning and sunk investment.

• In Chile, Google’s expansion ignited reputational backlash.

• In Ireland, moratoria have delayed projects critical to cloud growth.

For every multinational that survives, dozens of subcontractors vanish—suppliers erased by disruptions they cannot hedge, collateral in a rivalry between digital demand and ecological ceilings.

Investors rarely ask: how much of projected digital growth rests on water communities will not give? Boards rarely model: what if a drought idles a billion-dollar campus for six months?

Yet these are the questions that decide not quarterly earnings, but survival.

Sovereignty Redefined

This is not environmentalism. It is sovereignty.

• Digital sovereignty—the control of data, AI, and cloud infrastructure—cannot exist without water sovereignty, the control of the reservoirs and aquifers that cool servers.

• Nations now face choices: who gets priority when scarcity hits—citizens, farms, or the cloud?

Sovereignty is no longer only about borders. It is about the hidden infrastructures that sustain memory, intelligence, and trade.

Lessons for Boards and Governments

Tacitus wrote that corruption multiplies when laws multiply. Restrictions on water use will multiply as scarcity deepens. The wise act before they are imposed.

• Boards must stress-test digital expansion against ecological ceilings. Water-availability maps must be integrated into site selection as rigorously as tax or wage models.

• Investors must differentiate between firms that plan for water ceilings and those that assume infinity. Capital will flow toward foresight.

• Governments must design legitimacy hierarchies: who gets the last liter, and under what conditions. Without clarity, they will face political crisis when citizens perceive servers drinking before homes.

Closing

History will not remember how many terabytes were stored in 2025. It will remember whether societies confronted the fact that every byte has a footprint—and every footprint begins with water.

Empires of memory may rise in the cloud. But they will fall on the ground, at the reservoir.

— José Parejo

Founding Partner, José Parejo & Associates

Sunday CEO Strategic Insights | Sept 14, 2025

Strategic Foresight. Confidential Intelligence. Global Perspective.

© 2025 José Parejo & Associates. All Rights Reserved.