Joe Kava, the company’s head of data centre operations, has warned that water is “the big elephant in the room” for tech companies, which can typically use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day. “We’ve been focusing on power consumption and energy efficiency and that’s excellent,” he said in 2009. “I think the next thing we need to turn our attention to is what do we do about the looming water crisis?” As water becomes more scarce, data companies’ use of it could attract public scrutiny, he added, possibly resulting in regulations governing how much water they consume.