As India invites global data centre investments, communities across the US, Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia are resisting such projects over their heavy demand for water, electricity and land.
The article argues that AI data centres are being promoted in India as job creators, even though hyperscale facilities employ relatively few people once commissioned.
Concerns are growing over the ecological cost of large AI infrastructure projects, including water use, power subsidies, land acquisition and weak environmental scrutiny.
The piece calls on Indian climate and environmental campaigners to learn from global protests that have delayed or blocked data centre projects.
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.
Against this backdrop it was a jolt to hear the PM “invite the whole world's data to reside in India!”—a country that is much more water-stressed and perennially deficit in electricity than the ones where the protests are in full swing and succeeding. Did the invitation reflect a certain insularity that renders the government oblivious of related developments elsewhere? Or did it indicate a superficial understanding of the technologies that it is promoting? The PM’s justification for the 20-year tax holiday granted to data centres in this year’s budget along with other concessions is that “data centres will be a massive job creator for our youth”. That is as misleading as it gets. Data centres are massive warehouses for the servers needed by the AI industry and once commissioned these hyper-scale facilities spread over hundreds of thousand square feet would employ just a few dozen technician and engineers to run them. These are not the places where technology is developed or where people are trained.
These massive server farms are built to train, deploy and run massive AI models and unlike traditional data centres that just store and serve data, these act as giant AI supercomputers. Thus the need for intensive power to run the equipment continuously and humongous amounts of water for their advanced cooling systems to prevent the hardware from overheating. India is hugely deficient in both; it cannot meet the basic drinking water or power needs of its population even in the national capital. Land is another resource that data centres need in vast amounts and governments, both at the centre and in states, notably Andhra Pradesh, are making sure tech behemoths like Google, Amazon and Meta along with their Indian partners like the Adani Group and Reliance Industries get what they need, even if these are in ecologically vulnerable regions. The government is requisitioning lush orchards and farmlands and brutally clearing out inconvenient slums in the path of these big ticket promoters, both foreign and India, who have announced multibillion dollar investments. The largest of these is Adani’s $100 billion project for a 5GW AI infrastructure platform to build AI-ready data centres by 2035. This will build on the conglomerate’s joint venture with Google in Visakhapatnam for a 2 GW data centre that will be India’s largest hyper-scale facility. For this, the American tech giant is being allocated 480 acres (1 acre equals 0.4 hectare) in an ecologically vulnerable coastal zone that experts warn is already facing severe environmental challenges.
Climate activists and civil rights organisations have been campaigning for long against the Google-Adani data centres in Visakhapatnam and Ankapalli districts. But they have not found much traction although the issues they have flagged on the looming ecological disaster in the vulnerable coastal belt are cause for deep concern. Instead, the Andhra Pradesh government is lavishing huge concessions on the project. Among these are unjustified subsidies on power (15 years) and water (10 years) which the company will gouge out from the overburdened state grid and a much depleted public water supply network while ordinary consumers will be paying higher rates for their already curtailed basic consumption needs. There is also a whopping 25 per cent discount on the land price.
Why is India offering so many freebies to these extraordinarily profitable companies when advanced countries such as Germany are calling them to account and tightening regulations on AI infrastructure? The EU is cancelling hyper-scale projects as it shifts to smaller, more sustainable regional centres which focus on heat recovery and green energy. It is ironic that Europe is insisting on strict sustainability compliance while India offers a pass through on this score. It is no wonder that Google and other technology giants are making a beeline for India which offers massive state subsidies and makes no regulatory demands on them. In fact, the crucial environmental impact assessment has been waived for the Google project. What it amounts to is this: the Union and state governments had made an offer that no investor could resist.
What can Indian climate warriors and environmental campaigners do in the circumstances? They could do well to study how popular protests against data centres have led to successful outcomes, especially in the US. Data Centre Watch (dcw), which tracks the growing resistance, estimates that in 2025 local opposition delayed or blocked projects worth up to $152 billion in the US. It also finds that AI investments are becoming a critical political issue. In last November’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Georgia, significant victories were decided almost entirely on the data centre question. dcw notes that it “marks a rare area of bipartisan alignment in infrastructure politics” with both Democrats and Republicans raising concerns. There have been significant fallouts. Lawmakers now sitting in state legislatures have supported moratoriums on data centres and are also pushing bills that call for assessment of water and power resources in specific locations.
The lessons from the US and elsewhere is that activists need to be more organised and adept at lobbying politicians across the spectrum. So far, no politician of note has weighed in on this critical issue in India. Admittedly, the dynamics of protest are very different here. Opposition to the government’s pet projects is not looked upon kindly and dissent can invite a severe crackdown.