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Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.
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I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week we're continuing our re-airing of the Data Vampire series with episode two, Opposing Data Centers.
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I decided it was a good time to re-air this series from 2024 this month.
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One, because we are seeing so much backlash to data centers growing, not just in the United States, but around the world.
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And it's becoming a major issue in the lead up to the US midterms.
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But also because I have a book coming out on October 20th called Hyperscale that digs into the build out of these hyperscale data centers, the opposition to them, and why the tech industry is trying to build out a future that we do not have to accept.
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Data Vampires really laid the foundation for that book.
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It was, you know, where I did a lot of the initial research that helped to inform how I approached the broader narrative and the stories that I told in this book-length examination of what is actually going on here and what the tech industry is trying to do to our lives and to our world.
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So if you want to get a copy of the book, which I would really appreciate, you can do that by going to hyperscalebook.com where you can find links to go pre-order a copy of your own.
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Of course, you can also just go to your local bookstore, and I'm sure they would be happy to bring it in for you.
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Also, since you're a listener of the podcast, you're used to hearing my voice in your ears.
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Well, you might also want to know that I will be the narrator of the audiobook for hyperscale as well.
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So you can go and pre-order the audiobook and listen to me reading my book to you.
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So quickly, in this episode of Data Vampires, we get to the backlash, right?
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The growing backlash that we were already seeing two years ago against these data centers, the effects that they were having on communities in the United States, but also in Ireland, in Latin America, and in other parts of the world.
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And of course, the growing push for moratoriums on data center construction, which at the time were kind of nascent.
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We saw them in some places and there was a push to have them in others.
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But now there are plenty of moratoriums.
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I believe at last count, there are more than 500 local moratoriums across the United States.
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And earlier this year, we saw New York State become the first state to pass a statewide moratorium on the construction of data centers for up to a year.
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So there has been a lot of progress made since I recorded this initial episode.
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And of course, we're continuing to see progress with every passing month.
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Maybe the one final thing I would say about this episode is that it starts by talking about XAI and the data centers that Elon Musk and his AI company were building out in and around Memphis, Tennessee.
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Of course, the impact of those data centers has gotten even worse in the couple of years since I made the initial series, with, of course, people locally feeling the effects of that, but also the establishment of not just the first one discussed in the series, but also a second one, an even bigger one very nearby, that is, of course, having very similar effects on local populations and on the area.
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These are infrastructures that have significant costs to communities, and the tech companies do not really have an incentive to care too much about those costs unless local people make them by pushing back against the data centers and making them have to consider what people in these communities actually feel.
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So I hope you like episode two of Data Vampires.
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Of course, go and pre-order your copy of Hyperscale today, and thanks so much for listening.
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On March 22nd, 2023, the Future of Life Institute released a letter calling for a six-month pause on the training of powerful generative AI models.
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It was supported by Elon Musk and a slew of other influential figures in the tech and AI industries, but not all of them were sincere.
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Earlier that month, Musk had registered a company called XAI to try to steal the thunder from OpenAI and its chatbot, ChatGPT.
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But XAI needed time to catch up, hence his interest in promoting an industry-wide pause.
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Musk went public with the company in July, then began showing off its Grok chatbot in November, but if the company was going to grow, it would need more computation.
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In June of 2024, the Greater Memphis Chamber, effectively a chamber of commerce in Memphis, Tennessee, announced XAI was building its data center, or supercomputer, as Elon Musk calls it, in the city.
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The local council, not to mention the wider public, were completely caught off guard.
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Reporting by Forbes revealed negotiations happened over a few days in March, involving mainly chamber officials and a few other stakeholders, not the Democratic representatives you would expect to be involved in such a deal.
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XAI was taking over a former manufacturing facility, seemingly through a shell company called CTC Properties LLC, that was formed around the time of the negotiations and converting it to meet its needs.
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The company promised it would build a new electricity substation and a gray water treatment plant, but a contract for neither facility existed, nor was the deal conditional on XAI following through on those promises.
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And as we all know, Elon Musk doesn't exactly have a track record of following through on his commitments.
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The XAI facility, which is the size of 13 football fields, is located in South Memphis, near black communities that have long suffered higher levels of air pollution and environmental contamination.
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The cancer rate there is four times the national average, while life expectancies are 10 years lower than other parts of Memphis.
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In September, Derek Kerr, a journalist with MPR, found the company was already making things worse for them.
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It had at least 18 portable methane gas generators running on site, which is enough to power 50,000 homes, and didn't bother getting air permits for them.
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When the entire facility is complete, it expects to use 150 megawatts of power, or enough for 150,000 homes.
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Residents are worried what that will mean for their own access to electricity.
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In the past few years, the city has already been having to warn residents to reduce their power usage to avoid rolling blackouts.
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What will happen now with XAI and the demands of its supercomputer coming to town?
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As I learned about XAI's antics in Memphis, I couldn't help but think back to the Dolls, Oregon, the city where Google built its first company-owned data center back in 2006 and where, in 2021, residents had to fight just to get Google to disclose its water use, only to find it was soaring.
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Here's another community facing a data center project that creates serious concern about water use, and in this case, electricity access too.
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The company is trying to act in secret and keep information about what it's doing from the public.
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But the truth is these are not isolated cases.
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Across the United States and around the world, more and more communities are finding themselves facing down major tech companies that have a vision and demands that are far different from their own.
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And in a growing number of those communities, people are fighting back.
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In this week's episode, we're exploring the growing backlash to hyperscale data center projects around the world and how they're an important part of the broader fight for a different vision for how these technologies fit into our lives.
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This series was made possible by our supporters over on Patreon, and if you learned something from it, I'd ask you to consider joining them at patreon.com slash techwon'save us so we can keep doing this important work.
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New episodes of Data Vampires will be published every Monday of October, but Patreon supporters can listen to the whole series today, then enjoy premium, full-length interviews with experts that will be published over the coming months.
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Become a supporter at patreon.com slash techwon'save us today.
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So with that said, let's learn about these data vampires, and by the end, maybe we'll be closer to driving a stake through their hearts.
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Estimates vary, but data centers are responsible for probably two or three percent of global emissions, about the same amount as air travel.
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But they certainly don't receive nearly the same degree of collective ire.
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Remember a few years ago when we were constantly hearing about Fliegscum, a movement coming out of Sweden that translates to flight shame?
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It wanted people to feel bad for flying so much and to reconsider their travel habits.
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I haven't heard nearly as much talk of generative AI shame, though I've seen some terrible AI-generated images whose creators or prompters should be feeling it.
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But let's not get sidetracked.
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We'll get to generative AI next week.
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Two or three percent might not sound like a lot, but that number is growing as the tech industry's demands for computation expand at an accelerated pace.
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That abstract global figure also masks what's happening on the ground.
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Memphis and the DALs are two such sites, but some communities, if not entire regions or countries, are feeling those effects much more acutely.
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When I started working on this in the parliament, the prediction was that by 2030 the per grid would be occupied by 30% of all power going to data centers in the country.
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The amount that the data centers are absorbing is totally out of kilter.
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But it's also out of kilter with the rest of the world.
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That's Breed Smith, a TD or member of the Irish Parliament in Dublin with People Before Profit.
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She's been outspoken on the issue of data centers as their energy demands have been growing and the Irish public has been getting more and more fed up with the effects.
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In 2021, long before generative AI shone even more light on the data center issue, she brought a bill before Parliament that would have halted new data center construction, but it didn't get enough support to pass.
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Water use by data centers is a concern in Ireland, but the bigger one, as Breed says, is the staggering amount of electricity data centers are using.
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In 2015, data centers used just 5% of electricity, but by 2023, it was more than four times that.
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Just imagine of all the different ways electricity gets used in a country, for 21% of a country's supply to be going to more than 80 data centers, about two-thirds of which are massive hyperscalers that don't even primarily serve the Irish public, with dozens more in the pipeline.
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Data centers now use more power than all the urban homes in Ireland, and that demand has serious impacts.
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In some cases, other businesses can't get access to power they'd need to set up, but it also threatens the wider public's access to electricity, especially in the cold winter months.
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There's been amber warnings, which, you know, warns of blackouts of electricity on numerous occasions, particularly in the winter months since 2020.
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And that kind of alerted us to have a look at what is going on here, because it was very obvious, especially when you live in Dublin, that the proliferation of data centers was something extraordinary.
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The demand for power by data centers is outstripping what the grid can reasonably supply.
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As a result, there have been temporary moratoriums on new data centers in recent years.
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But even then, some facilities got around their inability to connect to the grid by building what's called islanded gas-powered generation infrastructure to bypass the grid altogether, regardless of the associated emissions.
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That's the other piece of this.
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Ireland, like so many other countries, is not on track to meet its climate targets, even as it's ramping up investments in renewable energy.
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As more renewables are added to the grid, they can't displace fossil fuels because the demands from data centers in particular are so high.
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80% of it, the new renewable energy is going to the data center industry.
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So it should be going to electrify homes and transport and bring green energy to hospitals and schools and everything else, but 80% of it is going to feed the data industry.
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Writing in the Irish Times, Hannah Daly, a professor of sustainable energy at University College Cork, explained how this approach makes no sense.
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Quote, growing energy demand at a time when we're trying to drastically cut emissions is like running down an upwards-moving escalator.
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No surprise, the data center industry isn't very worried about those concerns.
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It smears critics as though they're trying to take away people's access to Netflix and the various services that they enjoy, even though that's not what campaigners are demanding at all.
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They also suggest it's essential to build data centers in colder climates like Ireland to cut cooling costs and that they can contribute to communal heating systems.
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But Breed says there's only one of those even operating, and it's been slow going.
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Those same arguments have been made for the Nordic countries like Sweden and Finland, but there too, communities have been running into similar issues with data centers making significant power demands such that other industries have to go elsewhere.
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All of that presents an important question.
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Who is actually served by building out these infrastructures?
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I came into the parliament on the back of the grassroots movement to stop the privatization of water in this country.
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It was a very, very political issue for the majority of the population.
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Given that we're in a country that there's hardly a day goes by without raining, and we have plenty of the best stuff you can have, which is water, we were being, as consumers, ordinary people were being penalized for what becomes then the sins of big multi-global tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, who are all uh headquartered here in Ireland because there's a low tax rate for them.
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They've access to the European Union, they have a workforce that speaks the English language, but mostly it's low tax and low regulation or Zilt regulation.
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And so these companies put it to the government well, if we're going to be headquartered here and bringing in jobs, tech jobs, we'd also like to have our data centers nearby, and they've been given a carte launch to build what they want.
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This gets to the crux of the issue.
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For decades, Ireland has made itself an attractive place for investment by offering major companies, including those in the tech industry, low taxes, if not the ability to evade taxes in other jurisdictions too, and a slew of other benefits.
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Data centers have easy access to transatlantic fiber optic cables linking North America and Europe, along with weak regulations and planning rules that have benefited them immensely.
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But as they're demanding more from society, people are getting fed up.
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In recent years, Irish citizens have been asking whether that deal is still working for them.
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The big tech companies are making out like bandits, while it's become virtually impossible to afford to live in Dublin, and public services like healthcare and education are struggling.
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Now add to that a power grid that's feeling the pressure under the weight of the energy demands of hyperscale data centers, and you have a recipe for growing opposition, not just to the data centers themselves, but to this whole arrangement.
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Are these things useful?
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Do we need them?
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Should they take priority over BNMG going into our health service, for example, our schools, our transport system?
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We've never had that actual discussion, even at a political level, never mind at a more communal or societal level.
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It's really shocking how they're being facilitated without any question.
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Major tech companies have used their power to get their way, but it's not clear citizens will keep letting them.
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And it's not just Ireland where that's happening.
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Madrid, Barcelona, because they are metropolitan areas.
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But in the last year, they are moving to rural areas that are with not too much population, with elderly people, with not too much jobs, so they can go with this card of unemployment.
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We are going to give you jobs, the progress, and so on.
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Every day that I wake up, there is a new headline that there's a new data center that's gonna be built in Spain, and not the normal ones.
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All of them are hyperscale.
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So this is a problem.
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That's Aurora Gomez Delgado.
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She's behind Tunube Seca Mi Rio, an organization pushing back on data centers whose name translates to your cloud is drying my river.
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Promising jobs and prosperity is part of the pitch that these data centers make for public acceptance, even though there aren't many actual jobs to be had once construction is over.
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Breed told me that's part of the pitch in Ireland too, but those promises have the effect of captivating local officials who are thinking primarily about the short-term instead of longer-term impacts.
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The local majors always want to give jobs to their citizens because it's the main problem for all of them.
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The problem is the local majors always think in four years in advance because we have the elections only in four years.
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They never think about how the next generation is gonna be suffering, the lack of resources, the lack of environmental resources, or also the heat or the lack of water.
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So they believe this promise always because they have this problem of access of information.
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They say, okay, come here, we change our law.
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We also give you the terrain, the territory, so you can build everything.
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Targeting economically struggling areas works great for major tech companies who want a good deal.
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It's exactly what Google did in the Dolls two decades ago and what so many others continue to do today.
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In 2024, Karen Howe wrote an article in The Atlantic that told the story of how this is playing out in communities in Arizona, where water is also a big concern.
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She explained that the city of Chandler, Arizona, had stopped accepting data center projects because it's a wealthier community and felt it didn't have to make the trade-offs the companies required, while Goodyear, which was about 40 miles away, isn't so lucky and has continued to take on data center projects despite the pressures it places on its infrastructure and resources.
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Tech companies know those regions have few other options and will accept bad terms, whether it's for huge tax breaks, free land, infrastructure build outs, or water rights.
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That last one is the biggest problem in Castilla-La Mancha, even more so than it was back in Oregon.
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I'm from La Mancha, Castilla-La Mancha, where Metadata Center is gonna be built.
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And I have kidney problems.
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Right now I have uh uh strong kidney problems.
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When I was a child, there are so big routes that I have no tap water in my house.
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So this is the the region that they are coming from also or names means lack of water.
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So Castilla La Mancha means lack of water.
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Castilla La Mancha is a deserted region, which means it has very limited water already, and climate change is making that even worse.
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Beyond the residents, there are big pig farms that use a lot of water, and overtourism leads that problem to being worse too.
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Residents like Aurora fear there simply isn't enough water to go around, especially with the big demands being made by data centers and how climate change is making an already drought prone region even worse.
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Right now, this summer, there are 500 cities and little towns in Spain that they don't have access to water, to tap water, just to drink.
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This is a huge problem because we are, of course, a country that we have rural infrastructures of water since Roman times.
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So this is a really new problem for us.
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And in the lack of water, I think is the main problem for any citizen right now in Spain, and also the heat waves that are so so strong, they have so many thousands of dead people just in summer, due heat waves that are collapsing the sanitary system.
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We are even don't know how to fight against this, because it's you need money to isolate all the houses.
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You have climate refugees that they are moving to to the north parts of Spain.
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So it's it's a huge problem right now.
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In the same places that we have a lack of water, there are too much tourism.
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So this is uh the reason I think our campaign has had so much success because we have this concern about the lack of water.
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It's no surprise why people facing heat waves, drought, and water shortages would be skeptical or even angry about a massive data center coming to town, especially without the proper guarantees they won't make their environmental challenges even worse.
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Companies like Meta or Google know their wealth and the size of their companies, gives them power, power they can use against struggling communities and local governments that will do almost anything to attract economic activity they can sell to their voters as the industry of the future and justification to be re-elected.
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We'll return to the political question a little bit later, but if this is what major tech companies will do in places like Europe or North America, just imagine what they might try to get away with in other parts of the world.
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The story of Cerrillos goes back to 2019 when Google planned on constructing its second data center there.
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It already had one in Chile, in Santiago, in another municipality, but it wanted to build another one.
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Some local activists heard that eventually Google might construct a data center there, and that this data center might be using a lot of water.
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That's Sebastian Lewede.
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He's a lecturer at King's College London and has been researching the push to build more data centers in Chile.
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The country already has 22 data centers, but there are plans for another 28, and not everyone's happy about it.
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What happened in Cerillos, a working class neighborhood in Santiago, is probably the best example of that.
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Google made its plan for a data center there and had the full support of the right wing government of Sebastian Pinera.
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The president even did a public announcement.
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With Google executives, who surely expected the project to sail through, but the community wasn't going to let Google do whatever it wanted.
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So what they did, the local community, was that they downloaded this environmental report and they studied it.
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This is already very important because usually these reports use a quite technical language, and this is a working class community where not many people are lawyers, for example, or are experts on ecology.
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So it took them a lot of effort to understand this environmental report in the first place.
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And one of the things that they found out, thanks to their effort, was that this data center was going to use 169 liters of water per second in an area facing drought.
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They didn't have clarity on whether this amount of water would allow them to keep using, for example, their tap water or to, you know, uh flash in their toilets or having a shower.
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So because of that, they looked out for help.
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They even tried to get in touch with political parties, but they didn't receive much support.
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Like in the Dolls, Dublin, or Castilla-La Macha, Google came to Sadios with the usual pitch.
00:23:12.240 --> 00:23:15.519
They were bringing jobs and opportunity that would make it more prosperous.
00:23:15.759 --> 00:23:25.920
Initially, a lot of people bought into the story, but as those activists dug into the reports and started sharing their findings, the mood started shifting, especially when it came to water use.
00:23:26.160 --> 00:23:31.359
In the not too distant past, residents of Sarrios didn't have running water to their homes.
00:23:31.519 --> 00:23:36.240
They'd had to rely on water from trucks, and they did not want to go back to living that way.
00:23:36.400 --> 00:23:41.200
They sought guarantees from Google that that wouldn't happen, but didn't get the proper assurances.
00:23:41.359 --> 00:23:44.640
So they began to fight it, and did so quite successfully.
00:23:45.039 --> 00:23:51.680
They decided to not necessarily attack Google because of all the many issues that we have heard about Google, such as privacy issues.
00:23:51.839 --> 00:23:57.279
They considered that that might be a bit obscure for the local community, so they focused on water.
00:23:57.680 --> 00:24:06.240
And they put up some posters, they organized assemblies, they went to street markets to talk about this issue.
00:24:06.559 --> 00:24:11.440
And at some point, also in 2019, there was a big social uprising in Chile.
00:24:11.519 --> 00:24:18.079
This is an important kind of piece of the context because that really empowered some local communities that had been protesting for some time.
00:24:18.240 --> 00:24:24.079
And as a product of that social uprising, some communities decided to make a local referendum.
00:24:24.240 --> 00:24:30.559
And one of the questions in this referendum was whether the local community wanted this Google data center or not.
00:24:30.799 --> 00:24:40.640
So in December 2019, 49% of the community voted against the project, and only a 38% voted in favor of the project.
00:24:41.039 --> 00:24:48.960
The referendum wasn't binding, but it is a pretty significant step to go from a community largely supporting the project to voting against it within less than a year.
00:24:49.119 --> 00:24:57.440
That wasn't just because of the potential threat it posed, but also how activists who wanted to stop the project or at least avoid the worst outcome handled their campaign.
00:24:57.759 --> 00:25:05.279
This is one of the most hostile cases of activism that I've seen when it comes to communities organizing against data centers.
00:25:05.519 --> 00:25:14.799
So if you look at the graphics, for example, that they developed, they use burning schools symbolizing that basically Google is a toxic company.
00:25:15.039 --> 00:25:21.759
They put up posters talking about, you know, Google's extractivism and you know making connections with history.
00:25:21.839 --> 00:25:28.079
So I think it's a very interesting case also when it comes to the originality of the content of the material that they produced.
00:25:28.319 --> 00:25:34.880
One of the posters that circulated online read, quote, danger, danger, no to the data center, data theft.
00:25:35.119 --> 00:25:37.359
Ultimately, the community was successful.
00:25:37.519 --> 00:25:48.480
The project hasn't been fully canceled, but they stalled it for years and were able to force Google to the negotiating table to ensure that when or if it does get built, it doesn't use as much water as it was initially planning.
00:25:48.640 --> 00:25:51.920
So there isn't a risk they'll lose access to running water.
00:25:52.079 --> 00:25:53.920
But their success attracted attention.
00:25:54.079 --> 00:25:58.559
Other communities in Chile have looked to it as an example, as have activists in other countries.
00:25:58.880 --> 00:26:02.319
Aurora even brought up that Latin American activism in our conversation.
00:26:02.559 --> 00:26:12.240
Around the same time Google was facing the backlash in Sarillos, it announced another data center in Uruguay, leading some people to wonder whether it was a replacement for the one in Sarrios.
00:26:12.559 --> 00:26:17.680
But there too, it faced major demonstrations over the amount of water the facility would use.
00:26:17.920 --> 00:26:23.599
A banner in the Uruguayan protests made a profound statement, reading, quote, Water is not a present.
00:26:23.759 --> 00:26:26.559
It is not for sale, it must be defended.
00:26:26.799 --> 00:26:34.799
In some countries, these data centers are starting to spread around a bit, so the impacts on one community or region are not so severe, but that isn't the case everywhere.
00:26:34.960 --> 00:26:41.519
Places like Northern Virginia and Dublin are data center hubs, leading to the significant demands we've been talking about.
00:26:41.599 --> 00:26:45.359
But that's playing out in other parts of the world too, including in South America.
00:26:45.680 --> 00:26:49.359
There are around 170 projects in Mexico right now.
00:26:49.519 --> 00:26:54.480
And what is concerning is that usually these projects come quite clustered, right?
00:26:54.640 --> 00:27:01.519
Because they look for places where there are good connections, you know, sub-sea cables and so on, fiber optic cables.
00:27:01.680 --> 00:27:06.880
And because of that, they tend to get allocated within a very kind of small range of area.
00:27:07.039 --> 00:27:22.960
So because of that, I think that some regions in Mexico, such as Querétaro, Santiago in Chile, Sao Paulo in Brazil, are becoming big clusters of data centers despite already having a lot of energy and water pressure from the big city that are next to these data centers.
00:27:23.359 --> 00:27:35.279
Major tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta feel they can swoop into communities anywhere in the world and impose massive resource-hogging infrastructures without truly considering the impacts on the people who live there.
00:27:35.440 --> 00:27:39.759
At the end of the day, those local populations and their ways of life don't matter.
00:27:40.000 --> 00:27:55.519
All that really matters is expanding the computation available to tech companies as a means of increasing their revenues and profits and being able to do so at the lowest cost, which means finding jurisdictions that will make the process easy and hopefully throw in some tax breaks and other perks in exchange for their investment.
00:27:55.680 --> 00:27:59.599
That naturally leads to the kind of political questions Breed was asking earlier.
00:27:59.839 --> 00:28:01.599
Who actually benefits from these things?
00:28:01.839 --> 00:28:04.079
Should we be allowing them in our communities?
00:28:04.240 --> 00:28:06.000
And can they be stopped?
00:28:08.720 --> 00:28:12.799
As fights against data centers spring up around the world, progress is being made.
00:28:12.960 --> 00:28:23.119
After the pushback offered by Cerios, Chile's new left-wing government under President Gabriel Boric is working on a national data center policy to see rules and expectations for future projects.
00:28:23.359 --> 00:28:30.240
Gabriel Boric comes from the left in Chile, not even the socialist left, which is, you know, center left, but basically a more radical left.
00:28:30.319 --> 00:28:35.599
So one might think that he might have held a different kind of position when it comes to big tech companies.
00:28:35.759 --> 00:28:40.000
But so far it's been a continuity with previous governments in that sense.
00:28:40.240 --> 00:28:47.920
When it comes to data centers, I think there are reasons to be concerns, but also reasons to think that maybe something interesting might happen.
00:28:48.079 --> 00:28:58.400
The government wants to build a data center policy, basically, or a national plan of data centers, as they call it, in order to manage all these investments.
00:28:58.720 --> 00:29:09.599
And according to them, to make sure that these data centers respect, you know, ecological kind of considerations and also involve local communities in the planning of these data centers.
00:29:09.759 --> 00:29:15.680
How exactly that is gonna look like, what are gonna be the terms and conditions of that participation, that's not clear.
00:29:15.839 --> 00:29:21.680
So I am personally waiting to hear more about this before having like a final opinion about it.
00:29:21.839 --> 00:29:27.599
But I think it's already interesting to see the government trying to take measures in order to control this.
00:29:27.920 --> 00:29:37.200
Rules governing data center construction seem like the absolute minimum to expect at this point, especially given the push from companies to increase the number and scale of the facilities they're building.
00:29:37.440 --> 00:29:45.920
The lack of basic regulations on data centers seems to be a widespread problem, and companies lobby hard against establishing them, or just try to write rules that will favor them.
00:29:46.079 --> 00:29:55.359
In Ireland, as we discussed, companies often face fewer restrictions on what they can build, and in too many jurisdictions, governments are so desperate they'll give them permission to do whatever they want.
00:29:55.599 --> 00:30:07.440
Sebastian told me the rules in Chile could be a step in the right direction, or they could simply be an initiative by the government to create some mechanism for community involvement to stop what happened in Sadios from spreading to too many other projects.
00:30:07.599 --> 00:30:15.119
The quality of the consultation and community input will depend on ensuring they have the capacity to really understand what's happening and engage with the process.
00:30:15.359 --> 00:30:24.400
Quite often these local communities don't know much about what a data center is, might not even be aware of what these companies are all about.
00:30:24.559 --> 00:30:34.960
So I hope that as part of this participation, there is going to be a process where communities are gonna be able to self-educate with external support, of course, around data centers.
00:30:35.119 --> 00:30:37.680
So what's an achievable agreement, for example?
00:30:37.839 --> 00:30:39.599
What can they ask from Google?
00:30:39.759 --> 00:30:40.720
Or who is Google?
00:30:40.799 --> 00:30:43.119
Who is gonna be this neighbor, right?
00:30:43.279 --> 00:30:52.640
So hopefully they're gonna be able to self-educate before these companies make it to these areas and introduce themselves in a pretty biased way.
00:30:52.880 --> 00:31:02.880
So hopefully it's not gonna be only there being able to, you know, voice their concerns, but also be able to inform the final outcome of these projects.
00:31:03.279 --> 00:31:15.200
It's not just about getting communities to rubber stamp a project, but making sure they understand what a data center will mean for their future and being able to set certain conditions or stop it outright if it's clear the trade-offs don't make sense for them.
00:31:15.440 --> 00:31:19.119
We'll see how that plays out in Chile, but other countries have taken further steps.
00:31:19.359 --> 00:31:25.519
For some time, Singapore had a moratorium on data center construction, and Ireland temporarily halted it as well.
00:31:25.759 --> 00:31:38.240
As I mentioned earlier, data centers have become such a political issue in that country that Breed proposed a bill in Parliament to try to halt future data center construction, recognizing how significant of a cost they were already posing for Irish society.
00:31:38.799 --> 00:31:44.559
We brought a bill before the Parliament to ban any further development of data centers.
00:31:44.799 --> 00:32:07.119
We call the bill the Climate Emergency Measure Bill, because after the banking system collapsed in 2009, 2010, the government here brought in what they call the Financial Emergency Measure Bill, and that allowed them to do out anything they wanted, to hollow out the education system, to hollow out the social welfare system, to cut workers' pay, to cut pensions.
00:32:07.440 --> 00:32:12.240
But because they called it a financial emergency, they could do what they like.
00:32:12.400 --> 00:32:14.720
So we took that and used it back again.
00:32:14.799 --> 00:32:25.440
So we said this is a climate emergency, and this is a climate emergency measures bill, because data centers and the proliferation of them is going to stop us reaching our target.
00:32:25.759 --> 00:32:30.720
And we also linked it to the growth of the LNG industry, the liquefied natural gas industry.
00:32:30.960 --> 00:32:39.279
It was voted down, but we did get 50 of our elected parliamentarians to vote with us, which was very good, but it wasn't enough.
00:32:39.440 --> 00:32:48.799
And we got a huge amount of campaigners to support us, which I think is really relevant because it's awareness raising and it's setting the pace for the future.
00:32:49.200 --> 00:32:53.279
Breed's framing of data centers through the lens of a climate emergency isn't wrong.
00:32:53.440 --> 00:32:56.880
These data centers don't just use massive amounts of water and electricity.
00:32:57.039 --> 00:33:03.279
At a certain scale, they start to make it more difficult for countries to hit their emissions targets, as Ireland is experiencing firsthand.
00:33:03.440 --> 00:33:06.079
But many other jurisdictions are grappling with that too.
00:33:06.240 --> 00:33:23.119
In the United States, fossil fuel power generation isn't just being kept online in certain states to power the data center boom, but a report in Bloomberg in September found the country was actually planning new gas fired generation at its fastest pace in years, in part to fuel the growing power demands of data centers.
00:33:23.279 --> 00:33:24.240
And all for what?
00:33:24.480 --> 00:33:30.559
Sure, a certain number of data centers are going to be necessary if we want to keep some of the digital services we've come to enjoy.
00:33:30.720 --> 00:33:33.759
But how much computation and storage would that actually require?
00:33:33.920 --> 00:33:38.960
And do those services even need to be as computationally intensive as they're currently designed?
00:33:39.119 --> 00:33:47.119
The major tech companies would have us believe that if we don't support their data center binge, the internet itself will have to disappear, along with everything we like about it.
00:33:47.279 --> 00:33:49.039
But the truth isn't so black and white.
00:33:49.200 --> 00:33:55.119
The specific model they've developed over the past several decades is inherently computationally and storage intensive.
00:33:55.279 --> 00:34:03.119
That's the model of mass data collection to create profiles on us, to target us with ads and recommendations for content purchases and the like.
00:34:03.359 --> 00:34:05.200
That isn't inherent to the internet.
00:34:05.519 --> 00:34:13.760
It was a choice made by companies like those that now dominate the digital sphere to commercialize their products and services and make the massive profits they do today.
00:34:13.920 --> 00:34:24.000
That's part of the reason they need increasingly massive facilities crammed full of tens of thousands of servers and hard drives, not because that scale of infrastructure is truly essential for our online experience.
00:34:24.239 --> 00:34:27.679
We can take another path, but instead we're doubling down on this one.
00:34:27.840 --> 00:34:37.679
The generative AI boom is entirely dependent on that model of mass data creation and collection and the centralized computation that exists under the umbrella of the cloud giants.
00:34:37.840 --> 00:34:44.559
Without it, the massive foundation models that underpin chatbots like ChatGPT or Grok simply wouldn't be possible.
00:34:44.719 --> 00:34:46.000
And maybe they shouldn't be.
00:34:46.159 --> 00:35:06.000
If we collectively had a better understanding of what's necessary for some of these technologies and the actual power to have an input on our technological future, I think it's likely we'd choose a different path than the one being foisted on us by billionaires who increasingly live in a delusional world of their own making when they're trying to force us to bear the consequences of.
00:35:06.400 --> 00:35:09.360
If the cloud is ethereal, there is no problem with the cloud.
00:35:09.519 --> 00:35:20.800
But when you go to Meta and you see the territory, the vultures, the eagles, everything that's gonna disappear, you met the data center, you think, okay, this is a problem.
00:35:20.960 --> 00:35:27.679
We have to deconstruct this idea of the cloud, that the cloud is not material.
00:35:27.920 --> 00:35:29.840
The cloud is really physical.
00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:34.320
The cloud is also our problem because we are part of the cloud.
00:35:34.880 --> 00:35:39.679
Data Vampires is a special four-part series from TechWon't Save Us, hosted by me, Paris Marks.
00:35:39.760 --> 00:35:44.239
This original series was produced by Eric Wickham, and updates were made by our producer, Kyle Hewson.
00:35:44.400 --> 00:35:49.360
This series was made possible through the support from our listeners at patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us.
00:35:49.519 --> 00:35:55.760
We've already uploaded the uncut interviews of some of the guests I spoke to for this series exclusively for Patreon supporters.
00:35:55.920 --> 00:36:04.559
So make sure to go to patreon.com slash techwon'save us to support the show, and make sure to order your copy of Hyperscale, the ambition and excess of big tech's data empires.
00:36:04.719 --> 00:36:08.079
You can find more information about that at hyperscalebook.com.
00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:01.520
Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.
00:00:01.600 --> 00:00:09.839
I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week we're continuing our re-airing of the Data Vampire series with episode two, Opposing Data Centers.
00:00:10.080 --> 00:00:14.640
I decided it was a good time to re-air this series from 2024 this month.
00:00:14.800 --> 00:00:21.600
One, because we are seeing so much backlash to data centers growing, not just in the United States, but around the world.
00:00:21.679 --> 00:00:25.519
And it's becoming a major issue in the lead up to the US midterms.
00:00:25.679 --> 00:00:40.399
But also because I have a book coming out on October 20th called Hyperscale that digs into the build out of these hyperscale data centers, the opposition to them, and why the tech industry is trying to build out a future that we do not have to accept.
00:00:40.719 --> 00:00:44.640
Data Vampires really laid the foundation for that book.
00:00:44.799 --> 00:01:01.520
It was, you know, where I did a lot of the initial research that helped to inform how I approached the broader narrative and the stories that I told in this book-length examination of what is actually going on here and what the tech industry is trying to do to our lives and to our world.
00:01:01.679 --> 00:01:11.200
So if you want to get a copy of the book, which I would really appreciate, you can do that by going to hyperscalebook.com where you can find links to go pre-order a copy of your own.
00:01:11.359 --> 00:01:16.319
Of course, you can also just go to your local bookstore, and I'm sure they would be happy to bring it in for you.
00:01:16.480 --> 00:01:21.200
Also, since you're a listener of the podcast, you're used to hearing my voice in your ears.
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Well, you might also want to know that I will be the narrator of the audiobook for hyperscale as well.
00:01:26.480 --> 00:01:31.760
So you can go and pre-order the audiobook and listen to me reading my book to you.
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So quickly, in this episode of Data Vampires, we get to the backlash, right?
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The growing backlash that we were already seeing two years ago against these data centers, the effects that they were having on communities in the United States, but also in Ireland, in Latin America, and in other parts of the world.
00:01:49.120 --> 00:01:54.879
And of course, the growing push for moratoriums on data center construction, which at the time were kind of nascent.
00:01:54.959 --> 00:01:57.840
We saw them in some places and there was a push to have them in others.
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But now there are plenty of moratoriums.
00:02:00.640 --> 00:02:05.439
I believe at last count, there are more than 500 local moratoriums across the United States.
00:02:05.599 --> 00:02:14.319
And earlier this year, we saw New York State become the first state to pass a statewide moratorium on the construction of data centers for up to a year.
00:02:14.479 --> 00:02:19.120
So there has been a lot of progress made since I recorded this initial episode.
00:02:19.280 --> 00:02:22.879
And of course, we're continuing to see progress with every passing month.
00:02:23.120 --> 00:02:34.159
Maybe the one final thing I would say about this episode is that it starts by talking about XAI and the data centers that Elon Musk and his AI company were building out in and around Memphis, Tennessee.
00:02:34.319 --> 00:02:56.800
Of course, the impact of those data centers has gotten even worse in the couple of years since I made the initial series, with, of course, people locally feeling the effects of that, but also the establishment of not just the first one discussed in the series, but also a second one, an even bigger one very nearby, that is, of course, having very similar effects on local populations and on the area.
00:02:56.960 --> 00:03:12.960
These are infrastructures that have significant costs to communities, and the tech companies do not really have an incentive to care too much about those costs unless local people make them by pushing back against the data centers and making them have to consider what people in these communities actually feel.
00:03:13.120 --> 00:03:15.680
So I hope you like episode two of Data Vampires.
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Of course, go and pre-order your copy of Hyperscale today, and thanks so much for listening.
00:03:20.560 --> 00:03:29.360
On March 22nd, 2023, the Future of Life Institute released a letter calling for a six-month pause on the training of powerful generative AI models.
00:03:29.520 --> 00:03:36.879
It was supported by Elon Musk and a slew of other influential figures in the tech and AI industries, but not all of them were sincere.
00:03:37.120 --> 00:03:44.639
Earlier that month, Musk had registered a company called XAI to try to steal the thunder from OpenAI and its chatbot, ChatGPT.
00:03:44.719 --> 00:03:50.080
But XAI needed time to catch up, hence his interest in promoting an industry-wide pause.
00:03:50.319 --> 00:03:58.719
Musk went public with the company in July, then began showing off its Grok chatbot in November, but if the company was going to grow, it would need more computation.
00:03:58.960 --> 00:04:09.840
In June of 2024, the Greater Memphis Chamber, effectively a chamber of commerce in Memphis, Tennessee, announced XAI was building its data center, or supercomputer, as Elon Musk calls it, in the city.
00:04:10.080 --> 00:04:14.000
The local council, not to mention the wider public, were completely caught off guard.
00:04:14.159 --> 00:04:25.839
Reporting by Forbes revealed negotiations happened over a few days in March, involving mainly chamber officials and a few other stakeholders, not the Democratic representatives you would expect to be involved in such a deal.
00:04:26.160 --> 00:04:37.839
XAI was taking over a former manufacturing facility, seemingly through a shell company called CTC Properties LLC, that was formed around the time of the negotiations and converting it to meet its needs.
00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:49.839
The company promised it would build a new electricity substation and a gray water treatment plant, but a contract for neither facility existed, nor was the deal conditional on XAI following through on those promises.
00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:55.120
And as we all know, Elon Musk doesn't exactly have a track record of following through on his commitments.
00:04:55.279 --> 00:05:05.279
The XAI facility, which is the size of 13 football fields, is located in South Memphis, near black communities that have long suffered higher levels of air pollution and environmental contamination.
00:05:05.439 --> 00:05:12.800
The cancer rate there is four times the national average, while life expectancies are 10 years lower than other parts of Memphis.
00:05:12.959 --> 00:05:18.319
In September, Derek Kerr, a journalist with MPR, found the company was already making things worse for them.
00:05:18.480 --> 00:05:26.959
It had at least 18 portable methane gas generators running on site, which is enough to power 50,000 homes, and didn't bother getting air permits for them.
00:05:27.120 --> 00:05:34.800
When the entire facility is complete, it expects to use 150 megawatts of power, or enough for 150,000 homes.
00:05:35.040 --> 00:05:38.720
Residents are worried what that will mean for their own access to electricity.
00:05:38.879 --> 00:05:45.279
In the past few years, the city has already been having to warn residents to reduce their power usage to avoid rolling blackouts.
00:05:45.600 --> 00:05:50.000
What will happen now with XAI and the demands of its supercomputer coming to town?
00:05:50.240 --> 00:06:06.160
As I learned about XAI's antics in Memphis, I couldn't help but think back to the Dolls, Oregon, the city where Google built its first company-owned data center back in 2006 and where, in 2021, residents had to fight just to get Google to disclose its water use, only to find it was soaring.
00:06:06.319 --> 00:06:14.399
Here's another community facing a data center project that creates serious concern about water use, and in this case, electricity access too.
00:06:14.560 --> 00:06:19.360
The company is trying to act in secret and keep information about what it's doing from the public.
00:06:19.439 --> 00:06:22.319
But the truth is these are not isolated cases.
00:06:22.560 --> 00:06:32.319
Across the United States and around the world, more and more communities are finding themselves facing down major tech companies that have a vision and demands that are far different from their own.
00:06:32.399 --> 00:06:36.399
And in a growing number of those communities, people are fighting back.
00:07:10.319 --> 00:07:21.519
In this week's episode, we're exploring the growing backlash to hyperscale data center projects around the world and how they're an important part of the broader fight for a different vision for how these technologies fit into our lives.
00:07:21.759 --> 00:07:31.839
This series was made possible by our supporters over on Patreon, and if you learned something from it, I'd ask you to consider joining them at patreon.com slash techwon'save us so we can keep doing this important work.
00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:42.560
New episodes of Data Vampires will be published every Monday of October, but Patreon supporters can listen to the whole series today, then enjoy premium, full-length interviews with experts that will be published over the coming months.
00:07:42.720 --> 00:07:46.160
Become a supporter at patreon.com slash techwon'save us today.
00:07:46.319 --> 00:07:53.040
So with that said, let's learn about these data vampires, and by the end, maybe we'll be closer to driving a stake through their hearts.
00:07:55.759 --> 00:08:02.319
Estimates vary, but data centers are responsible for probably two or three percent of global emissions, about the same amount as air travel.
00:08:02.480 --> 00:08:05.759
But they certainly don't receive nearly the same degree of collective ire.
00:08:05.920 --> 00:08:12.480
Remember a few years ago when we were constantly hearing about Fliegscum, a movement coming out of Sweden that translates to flight shame?
00:08:12.639 --> 00:08:16.959
It wanted people to feel bad for flying so much and to reconsider their travel habits.
00:08:17.120 --> 00:08:25.759
I haven't heard nearly as much talk of generative AI shame, though I've seen some terrible AI-generated images whose creators or prompters should be feeling it.
00:08:25.920 --> 00:08:27.120
But let's not get sidetracked.
00:08:27.360 --> 00:08:29.040
We'll get to generative AI next week.
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Two or three percent might not sound like a lot, but that number is growing as the tech industry's demands for computation expand at an accelerated pace.
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That abstract global figure also masks what's happening on the ground.
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Memphis and the DALs are two such sites, but some communities, if not entire regions or countries, are feeling those effects much more acutely.
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When I started working on this in the parliament, the prediction was that by 2030 the per grid would be occupied by 30% of all power going to data centers in the country.
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The amount that the data centers are absorbing is totally out of kilter.
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But it's also out of kilter with the rest of the world.
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That's Breed Smith, a TD or member of the Irish Parliament in Dublin with People Before Profit.
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She's been outspoken on the issue of data centers as their energy demands have been growing and the Irish public has been getting more and more fed up with the effects.
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In 2021, long before generative AI shone even more light on the data center issue, she brought a bill before Parliament that would have halted new data center construction, but it didn't get enough support to pass.
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Water use by data centers is a concern in Ireland, but the bigger one, as Breed says, is the staggering amount of electricity data centers are using.
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In 2015, data centers used just 5% of electricity, but by 2023, it was more than four times that.
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Just imagine of all the different ways electricity gets used in a country, for 21% of a country's supply to be going to more than 80 data centers, about two-thirds of which are massive hyperscalers that don't even primarily serve the Irish public, with dozens more in the pipeline.
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Data centers now use more power than all the urban homes in Ireland, and that demand has serious impacts.
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In some cases, other businesses can't get access to power they'd need to set up, but it also threatens the wider public's access to electricity, especially in the cold winter months.
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There's been amber warnings, which, you know, warns of blackouts of electricity on numerous occasions, particularly in the winter months since 2020.
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And that kind of alerted us to have a look at what is going on here, because it was very obvious, especially when you live in Dublin, that the proliferation of data centers was something extraordinary.
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The demand for power by data centers is outstripping what the grid can reasonably supply.
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As a result, there have been temporary moratoriums on new data centers in recent years.
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But even then, some facilities got around their inability to connect to the grid by building what's called islanded gas-powered generation infrastructure to bypass the grid altogether, regardless of the associated emissions.
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That's the other piece of this.
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Ireland, like so many other countries, is not on track to meet its climate targets, even as it's ramping up investments in renewable energy.
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As more renewables are added to the grid, they can't displace fossil fuels because the demands from data centers in particular are so high.
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80% of it, the new renewable energy is going to the data center industry.
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So it should be going to electrify homes and transport and bring green energy to hospitals and schools and everything else, but 80% of it is going to feed the data industry.
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Writing in the Irish Times, Hannah Daly, a professor of sustainable energy at University College Cork, explained how this approach makes no sense.
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Quote, growing energy demand at a time when we're trying to drastically cut emissions is like running down an upwards-moving escalator.
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No surprise, the data center industry isn't very worried about those concerns.
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It smears critics as though they're trying to take away people's access to Netflix and the various services that they enjoy, even though that's not what campaigners are demanding at all.
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They also suggest it's essential to build data centers in colder climates like Ireland to cut cooling costs and that they can contribute to communal heating systems.
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But Breed says there's only one of those even operating, and it's been slow going.
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Those same arguments have been made for the Nordic countries like Sweden and Finland, but there too, communities have been running into similar issues with data centers making significant power demands such that other industries have to go elsewhere.
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All of that presents an important question.
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Who is actually served by building out these infrastructures?
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I came into the parliament on the back of the grassroots movement to stop the privatization of water in this country.
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It was a very, very political issue for the majority of the population.
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Given that we're in a country that there's hardly a day goes by without raining, and we have plenty of the best stuff you can have, which is water, we were being, as consumers, ordinary people were being penalized for what becomes then the sins of big multi-global tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, who are all uh headquartered here in Ireland because there's a low tax rate for them.
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They've access to the European Union, they have a workforce that speaks the English language, but mostly it's low tax and low regulation or Zilt regulation.
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And so these companies put it to the government well, if we're going to be headquartered here and bringing in jobs, tech jobs, we'd also like to have our data centers nearby, and they've been given a carte launch to build what they want.
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This gets to the crux of the issue.
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For decades, Ireland has made itself an attractive place for investment by offering major companies, including those in the tech industry, low taxes, if not the ability to evade taxes in other jurisdictions too, and a slew of other benefits.
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Data centers have easy access to transatlantic fiber optic cables linking North America and Europe, along with weak regulations and planning rules that have benefited them immensely.
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But as they're demanding more from society, people are getting fed up.
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In recent years, Irish citizens have been asking whether that deal is still working for them.
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The big tech companies are making out like bandits, while it's become virtually impossible to afford to live in Dublin, and public services like healthcare and education are struggling.
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Now add to that a power grid that's feeling the pressure under the weight of the energy demands of hyperscale data centers, and you have a recipe for growing opposition, not just to the data centers themselves, but to this whole arrangement.
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Are these things useful?
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Do we need them?
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Should they take priority over BNMG going into our health service, for example, our schools, our transport system?
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We've never had that actual discussion, even at a political level, never mind at a more communal or societal level.
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It's really shocking how they're being facilitated without any question.
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Major tech companies have used their power to get their way, but it's not clear citizens will keep letting them.
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And it's not just Ireland where that's happening.
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Madrid, Barcelona, because they are metropolitan areas.
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But in the last year, they are moving to rural areas that are with not too much population, with elderly people, with not too much jobs, so they can go with this card of unemployment.
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We are going to give you jobs, the progress, and so on.
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Every day that I wake up, there is a new headline that there's a new data center that's gonna be built in Spain, and not the normal ones.
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All of them are hyperscale.
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So this is a problem.
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That's Aurora Gomez Delgado.
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She's behind Tunube Seca Mi Rio, an organization pushing back on data centers whose name translates to your cloud is drying my river.
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Promising jobs and prosperity is part of the pitch that these data centers make for public acceptance, even though there aren't many actual jobs to be had once construction is over.
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Breed told me that's part of the pitch in Ireland too, but those promises have the effect of captivating local officials who are thinking primarily about the short-term instead of longer-term impacts.
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The local majors always want to give jobs to their citizens because it's the main problem for all of them.
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The problem is the local majors always think in four years in advance because we have the elections only in four years.
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They never think about how the next generation is gonna be suffering, the lack of resources, the lack of environmental resources, or also the heat or the lack of water.
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So they believe this promise always because they have this problem of access of information.
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They say, okay, come here, we change our law.
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We also give you the terrain, the territory, so you can build everything.
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Targeting economically struggling areas works great for major tech companies who want a good deal.
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It's exactly what Google did in the Dolls two decades ago and what so many others continue to do today.
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In 2024, Karen Howe wrote an article in The Atlantic that told the story of how this is playing out in communities in Arizona, where water is also a big concern.
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She explained that the city of Chandler, Arizona, had stopped accepting data center projects because it's a wealthier community and felt it didn't have to make the trade-offs the companies required, while Goodyear, which was about 40 miles away, isn't so lucky and has continued to take on data center projects despite the pressures it places on its infrastructure and resources.
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Tech companies know those regions have few other options and will accept bad terms, whether it's for huge tax breaks, free land, infrastructure build outs, or water rights.
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That last one is the biggest problem in Castilla-La Mancha, even more so than it was back in Oregon.
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I'm from La Mancha, Castilla-La Mancha, where Metadata Center is gonna be built.
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And I have kidney problems.
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Right now I have uh uh strong kidney problems.
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When I was a child, there are so big routes that I have no tap water in my house.
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So this is the the region that they are coming from also or names means lack of water.
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So Castilla La Mancha means lack of water.
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Castilla La Mancha is a deserted region, which means it has very limited water already, and climate change is making that even worse.
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Beyond the residents, there are big pig farms that use a lot of water, and overtourism leads that problem to being worse too.
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Residents like Aurora fear there simply isn't enough water to go around, especially with the big demands being made by data centers and how climate change is making an already drought prone region even worse.
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Right now, this summer, there are 500 cities and little towns in Spain that they don't have access to water, to tap water, just to drink.
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This is a huge problem because we are, of course, a country that we have rural infrastructures of water since Roman times.
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So this is a really new problem for us.
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And in the lack of water, I think is the main problem for any citizen right now in Spain, and also the heat waves that are so so strong, they have so many thousands of dead people just in summer, due heat waves that are collapsing the sanitary system.
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We are even don't know how to fight against this, because it's you need money to isolate all the houses.
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You have climate refugees that they are moving to to the north parts of Spain.
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So it's it's a huge problem right now.
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In the same places that we have a lack of water, there are too much tourism.
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So this is uh the reason I think our campaign has had so much success because we have this concern about the lack of water.
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It's no surprise why people facing heat waves, drought, and water shortages would be skeptical or even angry about a massive data center coming to town, especially without the proper guarantees they won't make their environmental challenges even worse.
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Companies like Meta or Google know their wealth and the size of their companies, gives them power, power they can use against struggling communities and local governments that will do almost anything to attract economic activity they can sell to their voters as the industry of the future and justification to be re-elected.
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We'll return to the political question a little bit later, but if this is what major tech companies will do in places like Europe or North America, just imagine what they might try to get away with in other parts of the world.
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The story of Cerrillos goes back to 2019 when Google planned on constructing its second data center there.
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It already had one in Chile, in Santiago, in another municipality, but it wanted to build another one.
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Some local activists heard that eventually Google might construct a data center there, and that this data center might be using a lot of water.
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That's Sebastian Lewede.
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He's a lecturer at King's College London and has been researching the push to build more data centers in Chile.
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The country already has 22 data centers, but there are plans for another 28, and not everyone's happy about it.
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What happened in Cerillos, a working class neighborhood in Santiago, is probably the best example of that.
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Google made its plan for a data center there and had the full support of the right wing government of Sebastian Pinera.
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The president even did a public announcement.
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With Google executives, who surely expected the project to sail through, but the community wasn't going to let Google do whatever it wanted.
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So what they did, the local community, was that they downloaded this environmental report and they studied it.
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This is already very important because usually these reports use a quite technical language, and this is a working class community where not many people are lawyers, for example, or are experts on ecology.
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So it took them a lot of effort to understand this environmental report in the first place.
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And one of the things that they found out, thanks to their effort, was that this data center was going to use 169 liters of water per second in an area facing drought.
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They didn't have clarity on whether this amount of water would allow them to keep using, for example, their tap water or to, you know, uh flash in their toilets or having a shower.
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So because of that, they looked out for help.
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They even tried to get in touch with political parties, but they didn't receive much support.
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Like in the Dolls, Dublin, or Castilla-La Macha, Google came to Sadios with the usual pitch.
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They were bringing jobs and opportunity that would make it more prosperous.
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Initially, a lot of people bought into the story, but as those activists dug into the reports and started sharing their findings, the mood started shifting, especially when it came to water use.
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In the not too distant past, residents of Sarrios didn't have running water to their homes.
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They'd had to rely on water from trucks, and they did not want to go back to living that way.
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They sought guarantees from Google that that wouldn't happen, but didn't get the proper assurances.
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So they began to fight it, and did so quite successfully.
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They decided to not necessarily attack Google because of all the many issues that we have heard about Google, such as privacy issues.
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They considered that that might be a bit obscure for the local community, so they focused on water.
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And they put up some posters, they organized assemblies, they went to street markets to talk about this issue.
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And at some point, also in 2019, there was a big social uprising in Chile.
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This is an important kind of piece of the context because that really empowered some local communities that had been protesting for some time.
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And as a product of that social uprising, some communities decided to make a local referendum.
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And one of the questions in this referendum was whether the local community wanted this Google data center or not.
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So in December 2019, 49% of the community voted against the project, and only a 38% voted in favor of the project.
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The referendum wasn't binding, but it is a pretty significant step to go from a community largely supporting the project to voting against it within less than a year.
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That wasn't just because of the potential threat it posed, but also how activists who wanted to stop the project or at least avoid the worst outcome handled their campaign.
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This is one of the most hostile cases of activism that I've seen when it comes to communities organizing against data centers.
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So if you look at the graphics, for example, that they developed, they use burning schools symbolizing that basically Google is a toxic company.
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They put up posters talking about, you know, Google's extractivism and you know making connections with history.
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So I think it's a very interesting case also when it comes to the originality of the content of the material that they produced.
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One of the posters that circulated online read, quote, danger, danger, no to the data center, data theft.
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Ultimately, the community was successful.
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The project hasn't been fully canceled, but they stalled it for years and were able to force Google to the negotiating table to ensure that when or if it does get built, it doesn't use as much water as it was initially planning.
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So there isn't a risk they'll lose access to running water.
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But their success attracted attention.
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Other communities in Chile have looked to it as an example, as have activists in other countries.
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Aurora even brought up that Latin American activism in our conversation.
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Around the same time Google was facing the backlash in Sarillos, it announced another data center in Uruguay, leading some people to wonder whether it was a replacement for the one in Sarrios.
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But there too, it faced major demonstrations over the amount of water the facility would use.
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A banner in the Uruguayan protests made a profound statement, reading, quote, Water is not a present.
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It is not for sale, it must be defended.
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In some countries, these data centers are starting to spread around a bit, so the impacts on one community or region are not so severe, but that isn't the case everywhere.
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Places like Northern Virginia and Dublin are data center hubs, leading to the significant demands we've been talking about.
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But that's playing out in other parts of the world too, including in South America.
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There are around 170 projects in Mexico right now.
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And what is concerning is that usually these projects come quite clustered, right?
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Because they look for places where there are good connections, you know, sub-sea cables and so on, fiber optic cables.
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And because of that, they tend to get allocated within a very kind of small range of area.
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So because of that, I think that some regions in Mexico, such as Querétaro, Santiago in Chile, Sao Paulo in Brazil, are becoming big clusters of data centers despite already having a lot of energy and water pressure from the big city that are next to these data centers.
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Major tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta feel they can swoop into communities anywhere in the world and impose massive resource-hogging infrastructures without truly considering the impacts on the people who live there.
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At the end of the day, those local populations and their ways of life don't matter.
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All that really matters is expanding the computation available to tech companies as a means of increasing their revenues and profits and being able to do so at the lowest cost, which means finding jurisdictions that will make the process easy and hopefully throw in some tax breaks and other perks in exchange for their investment.
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That naturally leads to the kind of political questions Breed was asking earlier.
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Who actually benefits from these things?
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Should we be allowing them in our communities?
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And can they be stopped?
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As fights against data centers spring up around the world, progress is being made.
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After the pushback offered by Cerios, Chile's new left-wing government under President Gabriel Boric is working on a national data center policy to see rules and expectations for future projects.
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Gabriel Boric comes from the left in Chile, not even the socialist left, which is, you know, center left, but basically a more radical left.
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So one might think that he might have held a different kind of position when it comes to big tech companies.
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But so far it's been a continuity with previous governments in that sense.
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When it comes to data centers, I think there are reasons to be concerns, but also reasons to think that maybe something interesting might happen.
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The government wants to build a data center policy, basically, or a national plan of data centers, as they call it, in order to manage all these investments.
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And according to them, to make sure that these data centers respect, you know, ecological kind of considerations and also involve local communities in the planning of these data centers.
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How exactly that is gonna look like, what are gonna be the terms and conditions of that participation, that's not clear.
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So I am personally waiting to hear more about this before having like a final opinion about it.
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But I think it's already interesting to see the government trying to take measures in order to control this.
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Rules governing data center construction seem like the absolute minimum to expect at this point, especially given the push from companies to increase the number and scale of the facilities they're building.
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The lack of basic regulations on data centers seems to be a widespread problem, and companies lobby hard against establishing them, or just try to write rules that will favor them.
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In Ireland, as we discussed, companies often face fewer restrictions on what they can build, and in too many jurisdictions, governments are so desperate they'll give them permission to do whatever they want.
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Sebastian told me the rules in Chile could be a step in the right direction, or they could simply be an initiative by the government to create some mechanism for community involvement to stop what happened in Sadios from spreading to too many other projects.
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The quality of the consultation and community input will depend on ensuring they have the capacity to really understand what's happening and engage with the process.
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Quite often these local communities don't know much about what a data center is, might not even be aware of what these companies are all about.
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So I hope that as part of this participation, there is going to be a process where communities are gonna be able to self-educate with external support, of course, around data centers.
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So what's an achievable agreement, for example?
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What can they ask from Google?
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Or who is Google?
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Who is gonna be this neighbor, right?
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So hopefully they're gonna be able to self-educate before these companies make it to these areas and introduce themselves in a pretty biased way.
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So hopefully it's not gonna be only there being able to, you know, voice their concerns, but also be able to inform the final outcome of these projects.
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It's not just about getting communities to rubber stamp a project, but making sure they understand what a data center will mean for their future and being able to set certain conditions or stop it outright if it's clear the trade-offs don't make sense for them.
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We'll see how that plays out in Chile, but other countries have taken further steps.
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For some time, Singapore had a moratorium on data center construction, and Ireland temporarily halted it as well.
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As I mentioned earlier, data centers have become such a political issue in that country that Breed proposed a bill in Parliament to try to halt future data center construction, recognizing how significant of a cost they were already posing for Irish society.
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We brought a bill before the Parliament to ban any further development of data centers.
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We call the bill the Climate Emergency Measure Bill, because after the banking system collapsed in 2009, 2010, the government here brought in what they call the Financial Emergency Measure Bill, and that allowed them to do out anything they wanted, to hollow out the education system, to hollow out the social welfare system, to cut workers' pay, to cut pensions.
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But because they called it a financial emergency, they could do what they like.
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So we took that and used it back again.
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So we said this is a climate emergency, and this is a climate emergency measures bill, because data centers and the proliferation of them is going to stop us reaching our target.
00:32:25.759 --> 00:32:30.720
And we also linked it to the growth of the LNG industry, the liquefied natural gas industry.
00:32:30.960 --> 00:32:39.279
It was voted down, but we did get 50 of our elected parliamentarians to vote with us, which was very good, but it wasn't enough.
00:32:39.440 --> 00:32:48.799
And we got a huge amount of campaigners to support us, which I think is really relevant because it's awareness raising and it's setting the pace for the future.
00:32:49.200 --> 00:32:53.279
Breed's framing of data centers through the lens of a climate emergency isn't wrong.
00:32:53.440 --> 00:32:56.880
These data centers don't just use massive amounts of water and electricity.
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At a certain scale, they start to make it more difficult for countries to hit their emissions targets, as Ireland is experiencing firsthand.
00:33:03.440 --> 00:33:06.079
But many other jurisdictions are grappling with that too.
00:33:06.240 --> 00:33:23.119
In the United States, fossil fuel power generation isn't just being kept online in certain states to power the data center boom, but a report in Bloomberg in September found the country was actually planning new gas fired generation at its fastest pace in years, in part to fuel the growing power demands of data centers.
00:33:23.279 --> 00:33:24.240
And all for what?
00:33:24.480 --> 00:33:30.559
Sure, a certain number of data centers are going to be necessary if we want to keep some of the digital services we've come to enjoy.
00:33:30.720 --> 00:33:33.759
But how much computation and storage would that actually require?
00:33:33.920 --> 00:33:38.960
And do those services even need to be as computationally intensive as they're currently designed?
00:33:39.119 --> 00:33:47.119
The major tech companies would have us believe that if we don't support their data center binge, the internet itself will have to disappear, along with everything we like about it.
00:33:47.279 --> 00:33:49.039
But the truth isn't so black and white.
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The specific model they've developed over the past several decades is inherently computationally and storage intensive.
00:33:55.279 --> 00:34:03.119
That's the model of mass data collection to create profiles on us, to target us with ads and recommendations for content purchases and the like.
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That isn't inherent to the internet.
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It was a choice made by companies like those that now dominate the digital sphere to commercialize their products and services and make the massive profits they do today.
00:34:13.920 --> 00:34:24.000
That's part of the reason they need increasingly massive facilities crammed full of tens of thousands of servers and hard drives, not because that scale of infrastructure is truly essential for our online experience.
00:34:24.239 --> 00:34:27.679
We can take another path, but instead we're doubling down on this one.
00:34:27.840 --> 00:34:37.679
The generative AI boom is entirely dependent on that model of mass data creation and collection and the centralized computation that exists under the umbrella of the cloud giants.
00:34:37.840 --> 00:34:44.559
Without it, the massive foundation models that underpin chatbots like ChatGPT or Grok simply wouldn't be possible.
00:34:44.719 --> 00:34:46.000
And maybe they shouldn't be.
00:34:46.159 --> 00:35:06.000
If we collectively had a better understanding of what's necessary for some of these technologies and the actual power to have an input on our technological future, I think it's likely we'd choose a different path than the one being foisted on us by billionaires who increasingly live in a delusional world of their own making when they're trying to force us to bear the consequences of.
00:35:06.400 --> 00:35:09.360
If the cloud is ethereal, there is no problem with the cloud.
00:35:09.519 --> 00:35:20.800
But when you go to Meta and you see the territory, the vultures, the eagles, everything that's gonna disappear, you met the data center, you think, okay, this is a problem.
00:35:20.960 --> 00:35:27.679
We have to deconstruct this idea of the cloud, that the cloud is not material.
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The cloud is really physical.
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The cloud is also our problem because we are part of the cloud.
00:35:34.880 --> 00:35:39.679
Data Vampires is a special four-part series from TechWon't Save Us, hosted by me, Paris Marks.
00:35:39.760 --> 00:35:44.239
This original series was produced by Eric Wickham, and updates were made by our producer, Kyle Hewson.
00:35:44.400 --> 00:35:49.360
This series was made possible through the support from our listeners at patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us.
00:35:49.519 --> 00:35:55.760
We've already uploaded the uncut interviews of some of the guests I spoke to for this series exclusively for Patreon supporters.
00:35:55.920 --> 00:36:04.559
So make sure to go to patreon.com slash techwon'save us to support the show, and make sure to order your copy of Hyperscale, the ambition and excess of big tech's data empires.
00:36:04.719 --> 00:36:08.079
You can find more information about that at hyperscalebook.com.
