Chile and Ireland Withdraw AI Data Centers, Global Water and Power Shortages Rally, Calling for 'Graveyards'
Chile's withdrawal of its AI data center sparked clashes between AI construction projects and protests around the world over water and power shortages, with some even calling data centers "graveyards."
In Ireland, authorities restricted new data centers in the Dublin area, citing "serious risks" to power supplies. In Chile, after activist protests, the government withdrew plans for Google to build a center that would have depleted water reserves.
In the Netherlands, construction of some data centers has been halted due to environmental concerns, and in South Africa, where long-term blackouts have been a common occurrence, calls to halt them have grown as data centers are placing a greater strain on the national grid.
The New York Times reported on the 21st that similar concerns have emerged in Brazil, the UK, India, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore, and Spain, reporting on the conflicts surrounding the construction of AI data centers around the world. Activists, residents, and environmental groups have joined forces to oppose the data centers, some attempting to block the projects, while others have called for more oversight and transparency.
The United States is at the center of the data center boom, with companies like OpenAI, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft investing hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive computing sites in the name of AI advancement. South Korea, with its strategy to become the strongest AI powerhouse, is enthusiastic about building and deploying data centers. However, AI giants are exploiting the Lee Jae-myung administration by exporting this construction boom overseas without any real, rigorous scrutiny.
To prevent their CPU chips from splattering due to their own heat, AI giants are intensifying their overseas center construction, seeking electricity to power them and water for cooling systems globally.
A new breed of supercomputer has emerged, linking up to 100,000 chips together in buildings known as data centers to create powerful AI systems. Tech companies are now relying on water to pack GPUs, ideal for running the calculations that power AI, into specialized computers as tightly as possible. "All this computing power comes at a cost, and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, hopes to build about five facilities that will consume more electricity than about 3 million Massachusetts homes," the New York Times reported on March 16.
"For two decades, tech giants have been building computer data centers around the world, crammed with computers to handle the online traffic that floods their internet services, including search engines, email applications, and e-commerce sites, reimagining how computers are housed and operated from the bottom up to accommodate artificial intelligence."
In 2006, Google spent about $600 million to open its first data center in Dallas, Oregon. This January, OpenAI announced plans to spend about $100 billion on a new data center in Texas, expanding that investment to an additional $400 billion for other facilities across the United States, and the Lee Jae-myung administration has been subordinate to this.
Rosi Leonard, an environmental activist with Friends of the Earth Ireland, said: "AI data centers are where environmental and social issues meet," he told the New York Times. "There's talk of data centers being necessary and making us wealthy and prosperous, but this is a real crisis."
A UBS report predicts that AI technology companies will spend $375 billion on data centers globally this year, and $500 billion by 2026.
Ireland, which had been the most welcoming country for IT companies for two decades, has turned its back on data centers.
Apple, Google, Microsoft, and TikTok have rolled out the Irish tech red carpet, establishing some 120 data centers scattered around Dublin and beyond, making Ireland their European hub. They projected that a third of the country's electricity will be supplied to data centers in the coming years, up from 5% in 2015.
The New York Times said, "Ireland's welcoming atmosphere has soured, and this is one of the clearest examples of the transnational backlash against data centers." Opposition gained momentum in 2021 when the environmental socialist group People Before Profit staged a protest at a data center conference in Dublin. Around the same time, residents of County Clare, where Ennis is located, objected to a proposed facility on farmland, and the protest movement has grown since then.
Local residents, including best-selling author Sally Rooney, joined the campaign against the AI data center, and last year, People Before Profit activist Darragh Adelaide was elected to South Dublin County Council, where he opposed Google's data center application.
The data center debate intensified in Ireland in January this year when a storm caused blackouts across the west of the country, straining the power grid.
"There's a reason the grid is under strain," said Sinéad Sheehan, an activist who organized a petition opposing the Ennis project with more than 1,000 signatures. "It's because of the imbalanced number of data centers."
An International Energy Agency report predicts that by 2035, the world's AI data center will be overloaded. The center is expected to use roughly the same amount of electricity as India, the world's most populous country, and a single data center can use more than 500,000 gallons of water per day, roughly the size of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
The New York Times reported, "The Irish incident is a first warning," and that "environmental groups around the world are now sharing information, tactics, and resources to fight back."
Chile, a pro-American economic powerhouse that was the first to sign a US-led free trade agreement with South Korea, has seen the anti-AI debate spread across the country.
The New York Times reported on the 20th, "In concrete laboratories in Chile's capital, Santiago, researchers are scrambling to get involved in the AI boom before it passes." "On Cerrillos Street, on the southern outskirts of Santiago, activists are fighting to block the data center that enables AI, and at the presidential palace, officials are exploring ways to expand the country's role in the technology on a shoestring budget without draining precious resources or alienating the public."
The New York Times continued, "The political debate surrounding AI has intensified across Chile," adding, "With a population of 20 million, the debate is becoming increasingly politically charged." The South American nation, rarely at the center of global technology debates, has become a vivid example of how countries are managing the trade-offs of the AI race,” the report said.
Chile has built its AI capabilities by attracting investment and talent, but while offering potential economic growth, it has also threatened the environment and deepened dependence on US tech giants.
The New York Times reported, “Chilean officials have proposed a new data center management plan that has sparked nationwide protests and recently sparked debate in Congress. Many Chileans, who view AI dimly, are wondering if it’s worth it.”
Rodrigo Cavieres of the Socio-Environmental Movement for Water and Land (MOSACAT), told the Times, “AI is becoming a new kind of fetishism,” adding, “Big tech data centers are being given priority over the population.”
Protesters in Santiago have protested against the data center, and Google has withdrawn plans to build a second data center in Chile.
The AI tensions are echoing conflicts happening around the world. It symbolizes.
From the United Arab Emirates, the most pro-Western, pro-IT country, to the Netherlands, many countries face the difficult calculation of whether to risk overinvestment, environmental burdens, and a public backlash from AI, or risk being left behind.
The New York Times reported that “their debate stems from a moment experienced by Álvaro Soto, director of Chile’s National Center for Artificial Intelligence, in 2023. That year, he tested an early version of the ChatGPT chatbot and realized that Chile might be left out in the cold by AI when asked about Chilean literature.”
ChatGPT attributed much of “Chile’s literary achievements” to a single poet and writer, Pablo Neruda, famous for being the 20th-century chele.
Soto responded that this was a sign that AI models weren’t built to reflect “local cultures and languages” like Chile’s. “Today, the AI center’s research team is training its own AI models based on overlooked data from Latin America.”
In June, Chilean President Gabriel Boric declared in his State of the Nation address that the country must embrace artificial intelligence, and the administration began working to streamline the process for foreign companies to build data centers and integrate AI tools into day-to-day governance.
The New York Times reported, “But despite all the political will, the communities affected by AI data centers remain deeply unhappy. In northern Santiago, a community group is protesting an Amazon site they see as environmentally destructive gentrification. Nearby, another group is protesting a Google data center that could impact wetlands.
A third group, operating on the southern outskirts of Santiago, has forced Google to withdraw its plans to build a second data center in Chile.”
In response, the Boric government plans to redirect data center construction away from Santiago to the less densely populated north.
Many environmentalists in Chile are concerned about the impact on the ecologically sensitive Atacama Desert, already affected by mining.
Marina Otero, an architect and Harvard lecturer who studies data centers, said: “There is a moment in Chile where it feels like we are looking into the future,” Otero told the Times. “The fight over AI will continue, and it is a sign of things to come.”
In 2015, Google opened its first data center in Latin America in Quilicura, a community near a wetland on the outskirts of Santiago.
According to environmental records submitted to the government during the project proposal phase, the site uses 50 liters of water per second to cool its computers, equivalent to the consumption of approximately 8,000 Chilean households.
Older data centers often evaporate water to cool hot computers, and while companies have recently designed technologies to conserve and recycle water, environmentalists say many data centers still use significant amounts of water.
Local activist Rodrigo Vallejos shared a video of what the area once looked like, with lush wetlands and lagoons, noting that "now, even during the rainy season, most of it is dry."
For Vallejos, Google's compromise was even more of a one-sided attack. “The data center is barely staffed, and the community ‘Offset’—a park next to the cemetery—is sparsely used,” he told the New York Times. “Eventually, we risk becoming an AI warehouse for the world.”
Rodrigo Vallejos, an activist and law student, has played a leading role in protecting the Quilicura wetlands.
Chile, a country dependent on the US economy and a pro-US “FTA broker” like South Korea in the global expansion of free trade agreements, is a regional AI hub with 33 data centers, a number that is expected to double by 2030, according to the industry group Chile Data Center.
Many Chileans are only just beginning to grasp the tragic events that unfolded last May, when AI giant Meta built a $750 million data center on the edge of Newton County, Georgia, and depleted the groundwater in nearby residential areas, amid Google’s one-sided propaganda about the facilities’ capabilities and effectiveness.
When Google announced plans for another data center in nearby Cerrillos in 2019, many residents anticipated job opportunities.
The New York Times reported, "According to environmental documents, the site is sparsely staffed. It will now be able to draw about 228 liters of water per second, equivalent to the consumption of about 40,000 households."
In line with the US's hawkish single-world market strategy, the US first signed a free trade agreement (FTA) with Chile, a South American country with a small trade volume, as a way to join countries opposed to it.
Chile then followed suit, leading South Korea to implement the FTA in 2004 under the Roh Moo-hyun administration. Chile and South Korea subsequently served as conduits for the expansion of FTAs to other South American and East Asian countries.
For Meta's construction of a massive data center in Louisiana, an exchange-traded fund (ETF) from BlackRock, the largest private equity firm in the US and a key investor in the Lee Jae-myung administration, became a key source of funding. Blackrock is the largest shareholder of Samsung, SK Hynix, KB Kookmin, and Shinhan Financial Group, excluding the owners and the National Pension Service.
Samsung and SK have built data centers in South Jeolla Province and Ulsan, respectively, leading to record-high stock prices.
Samsung SD is building the "National AI Computing Center," an AI data center equipped with tens of thousands of GPUs, at SolarSido, the largest solar power plant in Haenam, South Jeolla Province.
SK held a groundbreaking ceremony for the "Ulsan AI Data Center" in August, partnering with the SK-Amazon data center, and Ulsan City has been declared the "AI Capital."
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