Questions about what India’s race to attract global tech giants’ artificial-intelligence data centres will do to a country where water is becoming a scarce commodity are increasingly making it to American mainstream media, including The Wall Street Journal.
An article in the business newspaper considered the gospel for entrepreneurs and politically conservative Americans is headlined ‘Big Subsidies for Google, Limited Water for Locals: The Dilemma of AI in India.’
The Telegraph Online has earlier reported how India’s rush towards AI data centres, which guzzle huge amounts of water in order to keep servers cool, raises concerns about ground water.
“How can we be happy about Google coming?” WSJ quoted a resident of Visakhapatnam, who is giving up farming, as saying.
The woman, who told the newspaper that she “is getting around $83,000 in compensation” from the government, said: “We’ll all be scattered. It feels very sad.”
“Some fear their community will be hollowed out entirely, with many residents already pushed from land they have farmed for decades for the $15 billion project,” the WSJ reported.
Data centres, the WSJ highlighted, have faced “bitter opposition” in the US and other rich countries.
“Now, similar debates are spreading across the developing world, as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other companies rush to capitalize on growing demand for AI in places with newly emerging middle classes,” it said.
It underlined that developing countries are also more prone to water shortages.
“Their power grids tend to be more fragile. And given the low literacy levels in the rural areas where the projects are often built, their potential impact is often poorly understood,” the newspaper said.
It cited protests in places like Malaysia and Indonesia.
The Andhra Pradesh government is giving Google a 25 per cent discount for 10 years on the cost of any water it uses, along with a 25 per cent discount on the land, according to the WSJ.
“Other subsidies include reimbursement of costs related to electricity infrastructure and upgrades, waivers on state taxes and discounts on the cost of power.”
Farmers who have grown mangoes and cashews for 50 years are being forced out by the local government to make room, the WSJ said.
Anyone who loses land to a data centre is being compensated, but they “worry that for anyone who doesn’t get a job, the cash benefits won’t last, and land they are left with won’t be enough to farm sustainably,” the WSJ said.
Google, the newspaper reported, has pledged “globally to replenish more fresh water than it consumes by 2030 by restoring lakes and wetlands and improving technologies used in agriculture.”
It also quoted rights activists saying that such efforts are superficial.