Reshaping Resilience: How Tech Giants And Utilities Are Confronting The Global Water Crisis
By Christian Bonawandt
Water scarcity is increasingly impacting sectors from agriculture and energy to urban planning and high-tech manufacturing. At the Bentley Year in Infrastructure (YII) 2025 Conference in Amsterdam, Oct. 14 to 16, industry leaders representing municipal water management, engineering, and more explored how new technologies and complex industrial demands are forcing a fundamental rethinking of water infrastructure — moving systems from reactive operations to intelligent, long-term resilience. The core challenge facing the water industry is the intersection of aging infrastructure, increasing climate pressure, and a growing scarcity of resources, particularly amidst the water-intensive demands of AI technology.
The Inevitability Of Scarcity
The consensus among the panelists was that legacy systems, designed decades ago, are “no longer equipped to meet the challenges of the future,” according to Richard Vestner of Bentley. The tension is visible, he said, and largely attributable to “climate pressure, resource strain, and rapidly changing demand.”
Chloé Meyer, senior research director at Bluefield Research, identified the combination of a resource shortage and the rise of digital solutions as the most critical trend. This shortage is multifaceted: economically, the required investments to maintain aging water and wastewater assets are “not matching up to the levels that are needed.” Operationally, utilities face soaring operational expenditures (OPEX) due to inflation in energy, chemicals, and labor.
Adding to the economic woe are human resource limitations. Meyer noted the continued impact of the “silver tsunami,” where experienced utility professionals are retiring, making it “hard for utilities to recruit new talents and also retain them.” This convergence, she said, means utilities must learn to “do more and do better with less.”
From Reactive To Adaptive
To overcome these constraints, the industry is increasingly turning to advanced digital solutions. Resilience, in this new context, means designing systems that can adapt to more extreme and unpredictable conditions. Technologies such as digital twins, AI, and immersive simulations enable utilities to plan, design, and operate water systems with greater intelligence and foresight.
Rod Naylor, global lead for water at engineering firm GHD, emphasized that resilience is fundamentally about managing uncertainty. He described the shift toward adaptive planning, which involves creating scenarios and identifying critical trigger points for integrated investment strategies. Naylor highlighted that digital technologies are accelerating this process, reducing the response and monitoring cycle from years to months and even weeks.
Nuno Medeiros, head of asset management at EPAL (Water Supply Company of Lisbon), shared practical experience, noting that EPAL implemented an application called ONE (Optimization of Efficiency Network) in 2010 focused on solving the core problem of how to reduce leakage. However, as utilities apply more sensors in the network, the resulting data abundance creates a new challenge: “We have more and more data, but we don't have the system that can extract information from that,” he explained. The next great undertaking, therefore, is integrating existing technology to extract actionable information.
Data Centers And Utilities
A crucial theme was the financial and regulatory gap between the slow-moving, public-mandated water sector and fast-moving industrial users like data centers. Ben Townsend, head of infrastructure and sustainability at Google, told attendees that data centers often use evaporative cooling: “It enables us to reduce our energy consumption by around 10% on average but as much as 40% on a peak day.” The result, he said, is the company is able to better manage an “enormous amount of carbon emissions.”
Townsend noted that while data centers represent significant installed capital expenditures, they rely on public utility systems that “may be 20 to 30 years old.” Critically, Google has often found that utilities lack the tools or resources to understand the nature of their own infrastructure systems. In some cases, Google’s own internal assessments have shown that community resources are already oversubscribed. In such cases, he insisted, “They should not be offering this water to us or actually anybody else for that matter.”
Despite the challenges, Townsend sees a monumental opportunity. “Data center owners and operators who are building billions of dollars of data centers are ready and willing to invest in sizable upgrades and improvements to public utilities,” he said. Yet, this funding is often rejected because public utilities are fundamentally constrained by regulation.
“If you look at most public utilities in the water and wastewater space," Townsend stated, “they are mandated to provide water for your citizens for as cheaply as possible and ensure that it doesn’t poison them.” In many cases, he claimed utilities are often discouraged from taking a long-term stance on resilience. “We’ve approached public utilities and said, ‘We’ve identified XYZ issue and we’re willing to write a check for $150 million to go fix it,’” he explained. “They said, ‘We actually don’t know how to receive that check’.”
From left to right, Nuno Medeiros, head of asset management at EPAL (Water Supply Company of Lisbon); Ben Townsend, head of infrastructure and sustainability at Google; Rod Naylor, global lead for water at engineering firm GHD; and Chloé Meyer, senior research director at Bluefield Research at the water breakout session during the Bentley Year in Infrastructure (YII) 2025 Conference.
Transparent Partnerships
The solution lies in transparent, co-developed partnerships. Townsend asserted that “the most actionable thing that I can reference is transparency.” Data center developers, he added, must disclose projected water use to build trust.
Utilities, too, must be prepared. Naylor suggested that if utilities could “blueprint out what their perfect system might look like that they can’t afford today,” they could be ready to propose specific investments to major partners. Townsend agreed, noting that communities could ask the developer for a greywater project or request ideal locations.
Medeiros stressed that any successful partnership, whether industrial or technological, must share not only goals but information from which each can learn, including failures. “That’s the most important thing of all projects, is to share what went wrong,” he said. “We learn more that way than with success.”
This collaborative model is especially vital for water reuse projects, which are gaining global traction and are critical for industrial facilities seeking local approval, as they do not rely on scarce drinking water resources. EPAL, for instance, is seeking to utilize historic infrastructure from the 18th century to deliver non-potable water for irrigation and other uses.
The path forward requires not just technological leaps, but a regulatory overhaul and mutual transparency to capitalize on the unprecedented opportunity for private investment to strengthen public utility resilience globally.
Christian Bonawandt is an industrial content writer for Water Online. He has been writing about B2B technology and industrial processes for 24 years.