NYT: Data Center Fights Go Global
Data centers unleash hell on communities around the world. But people are fighting back.
The New York Times dropped a major data center story this morning: Power- and water-thirsty data centers have fractured communities around the world, particularly in places where residents already struggle to access fresh water and reliable electricity. The stories are nightmarish. Take the Mexican town of La Esperanza, where a nearby Microsoft-backed data center has made water and power shortages worse:
“In Mexico, residents said data center development should come with more investment in their communities. In the village of La Esperanza, near Microsoft’s site, there was a hepatitis outbreak this summer. Water outages left residents unable to wash their hands or maintain basic hygiene. The disease spread quickly, and about 50 people got sick….”
The disastrous effects of foreign data centers are no surprise; The big tech titans backing these multi- billion dollar projects have exported their predatory data center tactics in the US to the rest of the world. In America, big tech monopolists have largely targeted southern states when building their destructive data centers - states that typically have fewer safeguards against corporate predation, and communities tech companies believe they can exploit, both economically and racially.
The Times story has plenty of better news. As in the US, international communities and activists have pushed back against monopoly data centers attempting to rob them of water and power, sometimes years before data center resistance rose in the US. Data center fights began in Ireland as early as 2021, where data centers are projected to use a full third (!!!) of the country’s energy in the next few years. That resistance has grown in Ireland and spread internationally, driven by environmental and economic activists groups. The Times reported on an environmental group in Spain, whose name translates to the brilliant “Your Cloud Dries Up My River,” which has worked to spread resistance to other EU member states.
“There’s nowhere that doesn’t have a data center,” [group founder] Ms. Gómez Delgado said. “We’re coordinated. We’re talking to each other all the time.”
The story is worth a read. Although it doesn’t mention monopoly power specifically, it makes clear that the companies behind these destructive data centers are almost entirely composed of the big tech oligarchy: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, powered by monopolized NVIDIA chips. In the case of data centers and other predatory, polluting projects, the fight for environmental justice is also the fight against monopoly control of our communities and our resources. Even as governments betray their citizens by throwing many billions in incentives to build data centers, local resistance is rising and winning.