As AI fuels growth of data centres, critics fight back

MEXICO CITY - Data centres powering artificial intelligence (AI) systems are moving into cities and towns and encountering local resistance, a report by UK-based consultancy Computer Says Maybe shows.

Communities are responding to the centres by campaigning against the extraction of water supplies, toxic emissions from the energy sources they use and scant accountability by governments and big tech companies, the report says.

Based on five case studies in South Africa, Mexico, Chile, the Netherlands and the United States, the report found data centres are being built without consultation with local communities and little transparency about their potential environmental impact and water and energy use.

The study cites a 2024 investigation by Context in Querétaro, Mexico, where the local government is giving incentives to companies to build water-hungry data centres in a drought-stricken region.

The investigation found companies like Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc and Google LLC are often less than transparent about how much water is used to cool the servers data centres rely on.

How are local governments promoting data centres?

Data centres are being built in cities from Santiago in Chile and Zeewolde in the Netherlands to Ekurhuleni in South Africa where local governments are providing financial incentives such as cheap land and tax breaks, the report by Computer Says Maybe found.

In Brazil, the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is luring data centres by exempting key federal taxes on IT-related capital expenditures, according to Reuters.

"Data centres ... are strategic assets that (are) subject to geopolitical power dynamics and national agendas. So they're often steeped in these notions of economic development, bringing jobs, bringing financial benefits to communities," said Hanna Barakat, researcher at Computer Says Maybe, in an interview with Context/Thomson Reuters Foundation.

But when a data centre comes to town, big tech companies and local governments do not inform communities about the potential environmental impacts on water and emissions, the report said.

In the United States, data centres could use up to 9% of total electricity generated in the country by the end of the decade, more than doubling their current consumption, according to a report by the Electric Power Research Institute last year.

Why are communities worried about the environmental impact?

AI is poised to increase the amount of water that data centres use as the power-intensive processors needed have greater cooling requirements than do conventional servers.

In Uruguay, at the peak of the country's drought in 2023, Google's planned data centre envisaged daily water use of 7.6 million litres (about 2 million gallons), equivalent to the daily water consumption of 55,000 people, according to information obtained by activists in the country.

That data centre project is on pause.

"Data centres require exorbitant amounts of water and energy, add strain on the electrical grid and emit toxic air pollution and noise pollution into these local communities," said Barakat.

A single AI-focused data centre consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households and by 2030, their overall energy consumption in a year could be slightly higher than the total of Japan’s current annual consumption, according to the latest report by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The use of fossil fuels for powering these data centres is being criticised by environmental and community groups in places like South Memphis, Tennessee in the United States, where campaigners are demanding tech billionaire Elon Musk's AI company turn off the gas turbines that power the data centres behind its powerful Grok chatbot.

How are communities fighting back?

Companies like Microsoft and Amazon commonly claim their data centres are becoming water efficient or are generating their own clean energy to power the facilities, according to the report.

But access to detailed evidence on how such low-impact data centres work remains at best opaque, often secret and "is happening quickly behind a lot of closed doors," said Barakat.

"In the absence of information, it's often up to community members to do this task of requesting documentation, doing investigative journalism trying to fact check a lot of these green-washing claims."

Communities are mobilizing on social media to organise town halls and leverage their power in governmental meetings to demand details on the impact of data centres, often with the aim of getting the building of data centres paused or stopped.

(Reporting by Diana Baptista. Editing by Anastasia Moloney and Ellen Wulfhorst.)