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Digital Infrastructure and Hydrological Stress: Projected Impacts of Data Centre Expansion on the Colorado River Basin (2025–2050) The Colorado River Basin is experiencing a long-term structural water deficit driven by over-allocation, climate change, and rising demand.  Concurrently, rapid expansion of water-intensive digital infrastructure—particularly hyperscale data centres supporting artificial intelligence (AI)—is introducing a novel and poorly quantified demand vector.  This paper synthesised historical hydrological data, estimates the number of data centres dependent on the Colorado River system, and models basin decline over the next 25 years under multiple scenarios.  Results suggest that while data centres remain a minority water user (less than 1 percent regionally), their rapid growth, spatial concentration, and consumptive use patterns amplify localised scarcity.  Under high-demand scenarios, basin flows may decline by up to 35 percent by 2050, als...