In today’s newsletter: Communities from Scotland to India are pushing back against datacentres they feel have been forced upon them, warning they threaten energy supplies and the climate
Good morning. This summer, datacentres have become targets of resistance across the world. Ever since the arrival of ChatGPT, big tech has been lobbying for the creation of enormous new facilities. Many governments claim they’re essential in any country that wants to cash in on AI.
Campaigners argue datacentres drain resources and exacerbate the climate crisis. The Scottish National Party has backed a moratorium on new developments; so has the Greens. The boom has been immense, and so has the backlash. Today’s newsletter explains why.
At First Edition, we’re keen on pushing the boundaries of frontier technologies (no luddites here), so today we’re trying something new: we’ve produced a video to accompany this newsletter, and you can watch more on the Guardian’s Instagram page. Let us know what you think by replying to this email. How’s that for innovation? Before you do, here are the headlines.
UK politics | Andy Burnham has blamed Brexit and Margaret Thatcher for a decade of low growth in the UK, arguing that Britain needs to be brutally honest about having taken “a series of wrong turns” in the last 40 years.
Nepal-Tibet | A week on from the flash flooding disaster, authorities are urging relatives of the thousands of missing and dead to provide blood samples.
Middle East | The US has launched new airstrikes on Iranian targets, prompting counter strikes by Tehran targeting American interests in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, fuelling concerns about a wider renewal of hostilities.
Ukraine | Russia has opened a deadly new phase in its war against Ukraine by deliberately targeting the country’s railway network, with six employees killed on Tuesday in the latest strikes on Kyiv.
US news | Mark Carney has rebuked Donald Trump’s administration and urged officials in Washington to “start being serious” amid escalation trade tensions between the US and Canada.
In August I attended a meeting of campaigners and councillors in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets, where the government has recently approved plans for a 5,200 sq metre datacentre on the site of an old brewery off Brick Lane. The meeting, held on a sunny Monday evening, went on for three hours, in a stifling hall so packed that organisers had to create an overflow room. It’s a testament to how divisive the subject has become.
The new east London datacentre won’t be anywhere near as large as the “hyperscale” datacentres that power AI, which are typically 10,000 square feet or more. Neither is it the first to be built in the area (there are already three similarly sized developments nearby). But attenders I spoke with shared the same concerns as other campaign groups globally. They worried about the amount of energy the building will consume (5.2MW, according to a local campaign group, which is enough to power 15,000 homes), about its use of water (projections for this haven’t been released), and about the noise and heat it could emit.
They have good reasons to be concerned. The IMF estimates that by 2030, datacentres will consume more energy than all but the world’s three largest state emitters (China, India and the United States). They are already driving up electricity prices: one analysis found that wholesale electricity prices rose 267% over five years in locations near datacentres in Virginia. And although the industry argues that technology in newer AI datacentres consume less water than older facilities, not even the Environment Agency knows how much water datacentres use. It’s one of many unknowns.
Much of the anger here centres on how it’s been approved. Despite fierce opposition from local residents and Tower Hamlets council, which wants the site to be used for hundreds of homes, housing secretary Angela Rayner intervened, overruling the council to approve the application, citing its creation of 44 homes (only six of which will be socially rented) as a “significant” public benefit.
“When you have Andy Burnham talking about devolution and democracy, this feels like a slap in the face,” Henna Khanom, a Tower Hamlets resident, told me. “To me, it feels like many of these are springing up in places where low-income, ethnic minority communities just don’t have the power to resist these changes.”
This reflects a feature common to many of these battles: locals feel that datacentres are being forced on them against their will, with very little transparency or democratic oversight.
