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STEM subjects are key to getting South Africa’s youth employedDroughts in Uruguay and Chile have led residents to question the wisdom of their governments allowing transnational internet technology companies to build water-hungry mega-data centers there.
Like so much of the rest of the world, Latin America is being battered by increasingly extreme weather events — especially intensifying drought, driven by climate change. Data centers, like this Google center in Georgia, use huge amounts of energy and require regular hardware updates. Servers need constant cooling to protect data. Although their operations and energy consumption are largely opaque to the public, estimates suggest that Cloud streaming and digital game downloads can rival the energy used to physically distribute game discs. Image courtesy of Google.
“The more virtual we become, the more water we need,” explains Pablo Gámez Cersosimo, a researcher specializing in technology and biodiversity, “It is the water that makes virtuality possible.” However, the IT industry’s tapping into public drinking water supplies directly competes with people’s basic needs for it. And that competition is going to get more intense. With the explosion of artificial intelligence, “Google’s cooling water consumption in 2022 increased by 20% compared with 2021, and Microsoft’s water consumption increased by 34% over the same period,” says Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside..
Protests in Uruguay erupted early in 2023, opposing Google’s plan to build a large data center in the department of Canelones, in the country’s south. Uruguayan campaigners haven’t found the company sympathetic to their complaints. They were forced to go to court to gain even limited information about Google’s plans, and only then learned that its cooling towers will need 7.6 million liters of potable water a day.
Sosa says she believes that the wave of protests over the government’s inept handling of this year’s record drought will prove “a turning point” in the way Uruguayan society views the country’s environmental problems. “Who doesn’t defend access to potable water? Who likes to drink poor quality water?” she asks.
Carmen Sosa, an environmental activist in Uruguay, played a key role in the campaign that led to a constitutional amendment in 2004 making access to fresh potable water a human right. “Article 47 in the Constitution now says that the administration of water resources must be in the hands of the citizens,” she notes. “We must have a say in what happens to our natural wealth and water resources.
Google, a company that refused to release information on its water use in Chile until it was legally forced to do so, tells Mongabay it is rigorously adhering to the government approval process. Butthat this approval process is little more than a formality, as Google is already moving ahead with construction of an underwater communication cable extending from the U.S. East Coast to Las Toninas, Argentina, and Punta del Este, Uruguay.
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