Global resistance to AI data centres hardens

India must learn how to regulate environmentally disastrous data centres that guzzle more water and power than entire nations

- LATHA JISHNU

AT ABOUT the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi was grandly throwing open India to the world to set up AI (artificial intelligence) data centres, the very opposite was happening in the US, Europe, Latin America and elsewhere. Local communities and politicians were saying no to data centres and passing laws that would block the setting of such AI infrastructure because of their rapacious need for water, electricity and land. The resistance to data centres covers a wide arc from Santiago, Maine, Vancouver, Dublin and London to Johor (Malaysia), Batam (Indonesia) and Visakhapatnam. Across diverse geographies and different political ideologies, the opposition to data centres has been growing and hardening, the epicentre being the US, where protests are swelling over a wide swathe of farmland and urban centres areas. The shared concern everywhere is the AI industry's unsustainable use of energy and water, the noise and light pollution and the degradation of drinking water and soil, dwindling local employment. Basic problems. The larger anxiety over how AI will change society and what it means for the human race is not the issue in these campaigns; it is simply about the bare necessities of life which are coming under severe strain as a result of the unbridled expansion of Big Tech.