Andonovski: Large data centres are cooled with borehole water, not river or lake water

Minister of Digital Transformation Stefan Andonovski rejected public concerns that large data centres would rely on river or lake water for cooling, saying the facilities use technical water drawn from boreholes deep in the ground.

Borehole technical water, not surface water

Andonovski said he has no information that operators use water from rivers or lakes for data centre cooling and explicitly denied reports that a permit or contract has already been issued for construction of a 100-megawatt data centre that would use water from the Vardar River.

He stressed that the water intended for cooling is a technical supply obtained by drilling into inner ground layers and that in practice such systems circulate water rather than consume it.

“I often use the example of Slovenia, in Maribor, which uses water; it warms in the process of cooling the data centre, then it is used to heat greenhouses or for heating in households, and the cooled water returns again to the data centre. It is not consumed, we have no water consumption, and we will not allow anything like that to happen here either,” Stefan Andonovski said.

According to the minister, legal rules govern building permits and environmental safeguards: data centres up to 50 megawatts can receive a building permit from a municipality, while projects above 50 megawatts — which involve higher electricity use and may require water-based cooling systems — are subject to additional procedures and scrutiny to ensure they do not harm the environment.

Photo: press material from the event