AI, Colonialism, and Water
Where 'development' is Empire-speak for 'extraction'
Now, compare this with the facts below.
Worldwide, 2.2 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water.
4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation services
3 billion lack basic handwashing facilities**
By 2030, it’s expected that global freshwater demand will be 40% greater than available supply, with billions of people lacking access to safe water.
(Source: UNICEF, WHO)
Let’s look at some of the data for AI’s overall water footprints culled from different journals, articles, and research papers:
ChatGPT consumes 500 milliliters of water for every five to 50 prompts.
Data centers provide the physical infrastructure for training and running AI, and their energy consumption could double by 2026. Technology firms using water to run and cool these data centers potentially require water withdrawals of 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic meters by 2027.
Google’s data centers used over 21 billion liters of potable water in 2022, an increase of 20 per cent on its 2021 usage.
Microsoft disclosed it alone consumed almost 1.7 billion liters of water in 2022.
The world, analysts say, is in the process of creating “digital doppelgangers.” This means that in the cyber world that Meta and other IT firms are frenetically building, the virtual body will demand as much, or more, water daily as the physical human body.
“The more virtual we become, the more water we need,” explains Pablo Gámez Cersosimo, a researcher specializing in technology and biodiversity, “It is the water that makes virtuality possible.”
Local Dutch newspaper Noordhollands Dagblad has reported that a data center in North Holland operated by US technology giant Microsoft consumed 84 million litres of drinking water during 2021.
Training an AI at the computing level of a human brain for one year can cost 126,000 litres of water. Each year the computing power needed to train AI increases tenfold, requiring more resources.
The Cloud as it currently exists is housed in roughly 100 million computer servers, mostly located inside vast data centers, with each a gigantic warehouse covering many acres. Most, up to now, have been sited in the developed world, but IT companies are in the process of opening new centers in the Global South.
Already AI's projected water usage could hit 6.6 billion m³ by 2027, signaling a need to tackle its water footprint.
As of 2021, Indian data centers occupy over 8 million sq ft area. 60% of total data centres are in Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi and Bangalore. India's data center capacity is expected to double to 1318 MW by 2024 and 183 data centers by 2025.
Data centers consume 26 million liters per MW annually, resulting in a staggering 1.4 crore liters of daily water usage—equivalent to nearly 41,900 households in Bengaluru alone.
Google has planned to set up a 8-storey 381,000 sq ft data center in Navi Mumbai by 2025 with an investment of ₹1144 crore in first 10 years. Also Microsoft has plans to build a data center in Mumbai.
Navi Mumbai is where I live. The data centers will literally be 15-minutes walk from my home. Every summer, we have faced severe water shortage for the past decade at least. On Monday (April 18), Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said Bengaluru was facing a shortage of 500 million liters of water every day, which is about a fifth of the city’s daily total demand.
Apart from a decrease in annual rainfall (thanks to climate crisis) and depleting groundwater, what no one will talk about are the water-hogging data centers. DCs are estimated to consume nearly 3% of the water supply in Bangalore. They are supposed to spell progress, you see. They will bring jobs to the multitudes of desperate youth in a poor nation. The government will be lauded for being pro-development, never mind if there is no water to drink. Development is here.
Noncolonized fools that we are, we still don’t understand that development is Empire-speak for exploitation, and progress is a nuanced way of saying expropriation. Any protest will be featured as anti-development, being luddites, and the reason for India’s backwardness. No one will reveal the realities behind data centers, least of all the hegemonic corporations. Their survival depends on opacity, double-speak, and data suppression all in the name of Big Data. Irony is dead!
Data centers offer few jobs. A center consuming as much electricity as a small city may need just 30 employees, and not for all that long. “A data center’s life is between five and 20 years. This is not a permanent industry. It is extractive, like mines.” Data centers, say experts, are transient businesses, rapidly constructed in a Lego-like manner, using box-shaped utilitarian architecture. Like the computers and the data products the IT industry sells, planned obsolescence is built into the structures.
“Google will generate very little employment as it will just store data,” he notes. “It won’t pay tax, as it’s being built in a duty-free zone. It will give Uruguay virtually nothing and at the same time bring in its wake a set of serious ecological and social problems.”
~The Cloud vs. drought: Water hog data centers threaten Latin America, critics say
As mega-corporations and their billionaire owners engage in this mad race of heedless planetary catastrophe, there is going to be an exponential rise in data centers—the Cloud that doesn’t rain.
Corporations like Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI in true colonial fashion are lookin at developing nations to locate their data centers, even in the dry sub-Saharan Africa. As always, the poorest and the most vulnerable pay the cost while endless profit accrues upwards. Data centers are being built wherever IT companies can find cheap water and electricity and lax environmental standards. Inexpensive Latin American water is being seen as an attractive alternative along with other Global South nations like Africa and India. Pliant Global South governments are being made to host data centers with promises of jobs, development, and foreign investments.
The IT industry’s tapping into public drinking water supplies directly competes with people’s basic needs for it. And that competition is going to get more intense. With the explosion of artificial intelligence, “Google’s cooling water consumption in 2022 increased by 20% compared with 2021, and Microsoft’s water consumption increased by 34% over the same period,” says Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside.
The new data centers popping up in developing nations will be thirsty. That’s because, as servers store and process data, they get hot, and freshwater coming from the public supply is the cheapest way to cool them. Public services, maintained by tax payers, are being indiscriminately used to benefit a cabal of billionaires. Even as we teeter on the brink of planetary collapse having crossed at least six of the nine planetary boundaries, take a look at the data for fresh water. We are already way beyond the safe space.
With corporations appropriating potable, fresh water for data centers, and hiding behind insidious words like progress, productivity, and profit, the most vulnerable are once again sacrificed at the altar of a Molochian god. This time, it is called Dataism. This time, algorithm is god. “Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing,” wrote Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus.
Latin American communities fear that this “data colonialism” will consume water they desperately need for drinking and agriculture, and are critical of their governments for giving priority treatment to transnational tech giants like Google and Microsoft, while putting people’s access to basic human necessity at risk.
“Colonialism” is a nation’s enforcement of politico-economic authority over a people or territory. Though often linked to the geopolitical viciousness that branded the past five centuries, a growing number of scholars is pointing to the contemporary threat of so-called “data colonialism”. ~“Data Colonialism” and the ubiquitous appropriation of human life
The term “data colonialism” was coined by Professors Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias.
Couldry and Mejias have proclaimed that “traditional colonialism” is marked by four key characteristics: (I) the appropriation of resources; (II) the formation of new social orders; (III) an extreme concentration of wealth; and (IV) the creation of ideologies to justify the appropriative practices.
Against this backdrop, Couldry and Mejias have concluded that today, companies’ and authorities’ ubiquitous data extraction ticks all four boxes of what classifies a practice as “colonialism”. The emergence of a new data colonialism, based on the appropriation of human life through data, is paving the way for a new capitalism.
Noam Chomsky, a noted linguist and philosopher, said of AI:
"The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations. Let's stop calling it Artificial Intelligence and call it what it is: Plagiarism Software. It doesn’t create anything, just copies existing works from artists and alters them sufficiently to escape copyright laws. It's the largest theft of property since Native American lands by European settlers. "
We are heading for a world controlled by a handful of billionaires and trillionaires imposing their tech-fascism on the rest of the planet. This is insidious control with our direct participation using our knowledge without consent and for free. Shoshana Zuboff called this out in her brilliant work, Surveillance Capitalism. Ordinary humans are being algorithmically manipulated into becoming a part of the Internet of Bodies, for better or worse. The implications on our privacy is immense.
With ‘developing nations’ forced into Structural Adjustment Programs coupled with massive ‘debts’ from World Bank, a vicious cycle is created where environmental regulations and basic needs of their people can be overruled by mega-corporations with impunity. Companies are ‘strategically planning’ their data centers in the developing world with two-thirds of data centers not even recording their water usage.
The mega-nexus of Big Tech, Big Data, Big Money and politics is the face of the hegemony. They are more powerful than nation-states and have the capacity to overthrow, change, and enforce regulations for their benefit. Public resources are appropriated for private profit in the name of progress. Tax cuts and tax evasions ensure that nothing flows back from these monoliths into the communities they are devastating.
Instead, they engage in insidious and Machiavellian philanthropy, making massive donations to ‘various institutions’ thus ensuring their buy-in. The USA universities and the education system being a case in point. This ‘philanthrocapitalism’ is a cynical and dangerous way of buying social capital and suppressing dissent. Those beholden to these corporations for funding lose all vestiges of freedom, integrity, and sovereignty over their own actions and values.
This article is different from my usual pieces. With the pervasive rise of AI, the race to control generative A.I. by mega-corporations like Google and Microsoft, and the ubiquitous presence of surveillance tech and algorithm-driven behavior manipulation, the global civilization is collectively signed up to become experimental lab rats. None of us really know what we are signing up for. Our knowledge and data are used without consent; algorithms track our every move; and “the global Security & Surveillance market size was estimated to be worth USD 17680 million in 2022 and is forecast to a readjusted size of USD 28850 million by 2028 with a CAGR of 8.5(Percent) during the forecast period 2022-2028”. The mind boggles.
The hegemony has now become an invisible and global web of technology-enabled forces controlling everything from warfare to healthcare, from education to eating habits. Not only is it draining the planet of natural resources, it is tapping into every entity—living and non-living. This invisible web is currently life-averse and perverse.
How might we use this web of tech in life-affirming ways? Can we sense our indelible interconnectedness and entangled lives through this? How can we refuse the click baits and polarizing echo-chambers and instead find beauty in our differences, be awed by our myriad diversities? How can tech be put in the service of hearing the unheard voices, learning from hitherto unknown narratives? I think Gaza has become an example of this. No TikTok bans can erase the narratives emerging from Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and the peripheries that the hegemony desperately tries to hide. Technology is here to stay. What we need to become aware of is the ethics of its development. As well as the limits to its growth.
Currently, the underlying foundational narrative driving its growth, design, development, and dissemination is rooted in the colonial and hegemonic monomyth of power, profit, and privilege for a few. The rest of the planet is merely grist to the mill. The hegemony knows no limit. This essential denial of limits and the hubris of ultimate control is driving this menacing and Molochian race towards collapse. Perhaps those in the driver’s seat think they will escape in a space shuttle, the reality may turn out to be different.
As users, we can be subversive forces using AI in ways that benefit community, shared narrative-building, seeding solidarity and allyship across cultures, borders and boundaries. We can build infrastructures of collective envisioning and imagination; and refuse to become zombie consumers. We also need to become aware of the doublespeak underlying words like development and progress and refuse to be entrapped. Since tech is here to stay, let’s reimagine how we use it.