AI data centers are draining water from this drought-stricken Mexican town

As the climate crisis intensifies, billions of poor and working people around the world are suffering from lack of regular (or any) access to clean water, but the dawn of “AI” is about to make the problem much worse. In their recent report for Context, “Forget jobs—AI is coming for your water,” Diana Baptista and Fintan McDonnell write, “Artificial intelligence lives on power and water, fed to it in vast quantities by data centres around the world. And those centres are increasingly located in the global south.” In Colón, a municipality in Central Mexico that is home to Microsoft’s first hyperscale data center campus in the country, working people are already bearing the environmental costs of man-made climate change, and they will be the ones to bear the costs of AI and Big Tech. “The town of 67,000 is suffering extreme drought. Its two dams have nearly dried up, farmers are struggling with dead crops, and families are relying on trucked and bottled water to fulfill their daily needs.”

In the latest installment of our ongoing series, Sacrificed, Max speaks with Diana Baptista, a data journalist at the Thomson Reuters Foundation based in Mexico City, about Mexico’s ongoing water crisis and about the human and environmental costs of AI and cloud computing.

Additional links/info below…

• Diana’s Context author page and X page
• Fintan McDonnell & Diana Baptista, Context, “Forget jobs. AI is coming for your water (Video Report)”
• Fintan McDonnell & Diana Baptista, Context, “Thirsty data centres spring up in water-poor Mexican town (Text Report)”
• David Berreby, Yale Environment 360, “As use of A.I. soars, so does the energy and water it requires”
• Tamara Pearson, The Real News Network, “Indigenous Mexicans risk their lives to defend the environment from organized crime and ‘insatiable, predatory’ transnational corporations”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “In Brazil, the climate crisis is already turning working people into climate refugees”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “East Palestine residents have been left behind—and they’re running out of water”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Diana Baptista:

Hello, I’m Diana Baptista. I’m a data journalist for the Thomson Reuters Foundation context, and I’m based in Mexico City.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out all the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to or subjects you’d like us to investigate and please support the work we do at The Real News Network by going to therealnews.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we’ve got another critical installment of our ongoing sacrificed series where we are speaking with people, working and living in industrial government run and climate sacrifice zones around the US and beyond where we investigate the root causes and the connections between sacrifice communities and where we talk seriously about what we can do about it. In the description of a recent video report titled, Forget Jobs. AI is Coming for Your Water, Diana Baptista and Fenton McDonald write: “Artificial intelligence lives on power and water fed to it in vast quantities by data centers around the world, and these centers are increasingly located in the global south.” One estimate from the University of California, Riverside says AI’s total water demand by 2027 could be more than half the total annual water withdrawal of the United Kingdom, but all we really have are estimates.

Big tech firms have been secretive about the amount of public water used by individual data centers, and up to half of all data centers don’t even measure how much water they use. According to one survey, a municipality of Mexico City and Central Mexico is home to Microsoft’s first hyperscale data center campus in the country. The town of 67,000 is suffering extreme drought. Its two dams have nearly dried up. Farmers are struggling with dead crops, and families are relying on trucked and bottled water to fulfill their daily needs. Mexico leveraging its proximity to the US is hoping to convince big tech to nearshore their facilities. Here, the state of Quero is offering favorable land loans, cheap electricity in a pool of local talent. Similar stories are playing out around the world. In Uruguay, Google admitted that a planned data center in Montevideo would require 7.6 million liters of drinking water per day.

While the country was suffering a historic three year drought in the United States, a bill has been introduced in the Senate to compel big tech to reveal the environmental impacts of AI after reports of conflict over water between farmers and big tech in the desert of Arizona. So that’s what we’re going to be discussing today, and I could not be more honored to have Diana Baptista on the show with us. Diana is, as you heard, a data journalist at the Thomason Reuters Foundation. She’s based in Mexico City, and you can find a link to the vital video report that she produced with Fenton McDonald for context, a media platform created by the Thomason Reuters Foundation in the show notes for this episode. And if you haven’t already, I highly recommend that you watch the report and follow all the important work that Diana and her colleagues are doing over at context, but we’re going to have a conversation here that hopefully will encourage you to go watch the report if you haven’t already, because you really, really should.

And Diana, thank you so much for joining me today, and thank you so much for doing this important work. I was really excited to learn about it, although I was horrified to learn what you found in reporting this stuff. And so I want to dig into all of this, but I guess before we really dig into the meat of this particular story, I wanted to ask if we could start with a sort of zoomed out context here for the water crisis that is going on in Mexico and has been going on for some time. I mean, I remember as a grad student in Mexico City, like everybody else, I was getting my water and those big jugs people in our buildings were getting them delivered twice a week or you’d walk to the corner shop and carry back these heavy, expensive bottles of purified water while the stuff coming out of your taps was not fit to drink. So for folks who are listening to this who maybe don’t know about how bad the water crisis in Mexico is, I was wondering if you could just sort of give us some context there. How bad is it?

Diana Baptista:

First of all, thank you, Maximilian. It’s such a pleasure to be in this podcast. Thank you so much for the invitation. So yeah, let’s talk about Mexico. So we have drinking water. We have taps in 99% of the country. However, this is not drinking water. We don’t put a glass of water and drink from it. It all comes from bottles and the water we collect to drink afterwards. And this is because of several issues with infrastructure that have been going on for decades now. And one of the main issues we’re having right now in Mexico is drought. We have had several rain seasons that have been irregular. Our dams are not filling up, and this is all around the country except the southern part of the country, but most of it is just drying up. And the truth is that we’ve come completely dependent to water bottle companies and all these big soda companies.

So what we are drinking as a population, everything comes from plastic and everything comes from soda. It’s a very sad reality that we have been facing for decades now here in Mexico. And because of the drought. For example, in Mexico City this year, we were very close of reaching day zero, which is the day that the dams have been completely empty and there is no more left for consumption. This has happened in other parts of the world like South Africa. They’ve overcome it and we really didn’t have any plan to overcome it. There were several plans of infrastructure and stuff, but the only way we survived that was thanks to the rain, it rained finally. It has been raining quite intensely, and it was just luck. We got lucky this rain season and it has been raining otherwise, perhaps we would’ve reached day zero for Mexico City, and that means around 20 million people without access to water.

So very serious stuff. And we focused on our investigation on a place that is north of Mexico City. It’s around three hours away. That is called Quero. And for many years this has been a semi deserter and it has been struggling with tremendous drought. This means that at least for three years, rain seasons have been irregular. Dams are almost completely empty. If you go there, everything is yellow, everything feels dry. And the sun with the heat waves, we have been getting, it has been horrible up there. And while people are dependent more than ever on water bottle companies at the moment, so one of the main issues we have in Mexico as well is unequal water distribution. So this means that this big and bottled water companies are located in these places with extreme drought and most of the water is being allocated to them. So our public water, our public resources are going to these companies so they can sell water to us in the form of plastic. And activists for many years now have been fighting this around the country because this is for soda, for bottled water and for beer and a lot of beer that’s getting exported to the United States, for example. So activists have been very angry for many years denouncing that this water inequality is just very hard on the population.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to circle back to that in the end when we sort of connect this story in Mexico that you’ve reported on to the other stories that we’ve been reporting on in this sacrificed series and kind of how what you’re describing is really the future that lies in store for so many of us. And that future is already here for towns like East Palestine, Ohio, where people are still living off of bottled water. So I want to end up there, but let’s kind of stay in Colon for a minute and talk about what it was like for you to really start digging into this story and what you were learning about Microsoft’s plans for this massive campus in Cologne, a municipality that’s already experiencing extreme drought.

Diana Baptista:

Of course. So this was all burned. This all came from the fact that Thom from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, we had been investigating the expansion of data centers in the global south. And we had been reading that a lot of them were coming to Mexico, and suddenly Microsoft made this big announcement saying, we have invested billions in the state of Carrero and we’re opening up this hyperscale cloud region, which we’re not very sure yet what it means, but it came with billions of dollars of investment and it was a huge announcement. It even reached the president. The president was very happy about this investment. So we looked at Rero and wondered, oh, we know data center stick water. We know there’s not enough data on how much water they take, but there have been a lot of battles around the global south when these data centers come to town.

And we were very interested in the fact that from Carrero, we heard nothing but silence. We weren’t hearing the activists, we weren’t hearing the protests. So we wondered, is nobody looking at Carrero? What’s happening there? So we decided to make the trip up there to Cologne. The colon is this very large municipality. So you have a lot of in cologne, you have car manufacturers and you have agriculture and you have chickens and meat and protein industry. And then you have these very small towns hidden in the mountains that are the ones who small farmers and people living off tourism actually live. And they’re among the most vulnerable population in our country. So we went up there and Quero has always had a problem because of all the water that goes to the industry, you have these huge industrial parks among these yellowed hills where everything you see is dry and a lot of water is being taken by the industry.

And it’s such a stark contrast from where you’d expect big industry to grow. And then we went to this little towns in the municipality of cologne. There must be around 50 minutes away from where all the industrial parks with the data centers are located. And over there we saw people really struggling. We went to a community that is called Lare, and this is an indigenous community. Most people are very small farmers. They have very small restaurants that has no electricity, they have no tap water there. They bring their own water and water jugs, and they live of tourism from every weekend. People would go from Mexico City or from Carrero capital to that little town and just spend a couple days next to the dam in the water, eat and go back home. So that’s what the people live off. But when we went there, the dams were almost completely empty. There was nobody there. We went there on Father’s Day, which is supposed to be one of the most active days, and there was a lot of music. There were people, but after a couple of hours, everybody left and the businesses were all empty. So we saw people had nobody to sell their fish to or their produce. Nobody was doing water sports, they weren’t eating at the restaurants. It just felt very lonely. Where this town’s life is around water. When there’s no water, everything just dies around it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

As the water protectors have famously burned onto our memories, water is life and without water, there’s no life. And that’s really the direction that we’re heading in. I mean, how more basically can we put it here? And I want to kind of drill down on this point because I know as you guys say in the report, and as I mentioned in the introduction, it’s actually hard to determine how much water these data centers and big tech in general are using. But we know that that usage has spiked since the introduction of AI products like Chat, GPT. And there’s an article by Yale’s E 360 that I’ll include in the show notes for this episode that reads, according to a recent study by Ren, Google’s data centers used 20% more water in 2022 than they did in 2021. And Microsoft’s water use rose by 34% in the same period. Google data centers host its Barred chatbot and other generative ais. Microsoft Servers host chat GPT as well as its bigger siblings, GPT-3 and GPT-4. All three are produced by open AI in which Microsoft is a large investor. So Diana, could you just flesh this out a little more for folks, how the introduction of so-called AI has played into this story and how much water usage we’re really talking about here?

Diana Baptista:

I mean, this has been quite an adventure to try to figure out how much water is being used. So when we first heard that data centers were coming to Queretaro and we’re talking about the three big companies, so we had announcements by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon for billions of dollars coming to this little town without water. So the first thing we did was ask. We asked the companies, can you tell us how much water, how many data center units you have first in the state and how many you’re planning to build and how much water they will take? Microsoft kept telling us they had no spokesperson that could give us information. Amazon gave us some explanation that the tech they’re going to use is very new, doesn’t take water, but they wouldn’t go into detail because of industrial secrecy and all that. And Google just said they’re bringing down the water usage.

So we didn’t get answers. From there, we decided to ask the government, the local government who has been doing a major push to bring these data centers to town. So we have Governor Mauricio Kuri from the first day he was appointed as governor, he traveled to Washington DC to meet with Amazon people to try to convince them to bring their data centers to Carrero. So from day one, it has been a priority of the local government to bring them. And when I spoke to the Secretary of Sustainable Development, Marco Elte, who is one of the main figures bringing the data centers to town, he said he didn’t have the figures because he’s not the water commission, so he doesn’t allocate the water. But he also gave me some very weird numbers saying that the data centers in Quero take the same amount of water as a hotel room with 55 rooms or the same as a restaurant in 30 days.

But he wouldn’t say where these estimations came from. Very weird estimations to begin with, which meant he must have known how many gallons, at least one unit is taken. But then he said he didn’t know. So we felt we kept being played around. There was such huge capacity in the public and in the private sector, we asked the National Water Commission, and they only told us that they haven’t allocated any new concessions to any new companies in Carrera. But one thing about Mexico that is one of the roots of our water crisis is that at some point in our history, the National Water Commission gave away a lot of concessions to a lot of private people and a lot of private companies. And the way our law works is that they can sell that concession. So Maximilian, you may have owned an entire aquifer, for example, and you decide to sell it to Microsoft and you don’t have to ask anybody about this, you just tell the water commission.

You did that and that’s it. So people who owned these concessions have been selling to the industry in a way that then the public has no say in it. You have no voice in it because it’s a private thing between particulars and then the public is left without water and you don’t even know who sold it to whom. So it’s been, I don’t know, it’s very bureaucratic, but also a lot of opacity on how these concessions are being sold. And the National Water Commission told us that that’s how Microsoft got one of its commissions. It got sold to them by somebody who already owned one, which is very grave, right? Because then it allows for absolutely zero accountability. So once we had this information, we tried to figure out on our own how much water these data centers were taken. We went to public databases for the National Water Commission, and we couldn’t find anything because this information is no longer public once it belongs to a private company or you don’t know who is selling to whom.

So we were left in the dark. Companies refuse to tell this information. Local government said they didn’t have the information, which we found was ridiculous. And then you have local activists that for many, many years have been fighting for equal distribution of water in Quero, but they were also left in the dark. There are very small group to begin with who have been asking in the last month, in recent months have been asking the secretary like, Hey, can you tell us how much water these data centers are going to take? And he always says that, don’t worry about this. These data centers do not take a lot of water. They cannot come to Carrera because there’s no water to begin with, so we cannot give them more water. They’re super efficient data centers, but then we’re already left in the dark about how this technology operates, this super, supposedly super efficient new data centers that do not require water.

We don’t know how they work. We have no way to prove that they are actually water efficient, that they require zero water. We just have to take everything at face value, everything that the local government and the companies tell you. And activists actually found out from context about the concession bought by Microsoft. So it has been very difficult to figure this out. And when Finon reached out to some international experts that have been doing this estimations of how much water this data centers take around the world, they told us the same thing. There’s no data on data centers. They have to rely on certain estimations and certain methodologies they have developed by themselves, but there is nothing certain. And it has been very frustrating trying to figure it out and trying to do the estimations by yourselves when nobody is cooperating, nobody’s giving you any numbers to start up from. So it makes a journalist job very difficult. But we also see it makes the activist jobs very difficult because then we have no certainty and no possibility for accountability.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s really beautifully and powerfully put. And again, I want to encourage everyone listening to this to go watch the report itself because Diana and Fenton dig into this a lot more there. And Diana, I just wanted to ask just to make sure that folks are keeping up with us. You guys talk a bit about what the hell they’re using the water for, but can you just give us the basics there? Why do these data centers need so much water and why does AI demand so much water?

Diana Baptista:

Of course, it comes down to cooling. These data centers get very, very hot from all the computing, from all the computing processing it requires. It gets very hot inside a data center unit. So they can use two things, either electricity or water to cool off a data center. So you will hear information sometimes from a company saying that they have become super water efficient and they do not require fresh drinking water, which is the kind of water they need. They don’t need recycled water. They need fresh drinking water to cool down their huge computers, so using electricity. But the experts we have spoken to have also estimated how much water a country needs to power. Its electricity that powers the data centers. So no process for a data center is water free to begin with. Everything requires water. So of course they may come to Reta and say, all we’re going to need is electricity, but in the end, the power plants are also running on water.

So Queretaro needs water to run these power plants to run data centers. So in the end, everything needs water. So that becomes kind of tricky to understand. What does AI have to do with this? First of all, most of the data centers that are coming to Mexico are for the cloud for storing our images and our memes, our thousand on red emails and everything like this. The secretary, when I spoke to him, he said this was the industry of the future that everything we would need as humans would be cloud storage. And that quero would be so much stronger by become a data center valley because the world wouldn’t need our services. Which tells us a lot about balancing the creation of jobs with the depletion of our natural resources and ai. Yes, as these AI systems grow, these companies are also looking to the global south to locate their data centers.

And experts told us this is for different reasons. First of all, because local governments are giving them incentives. So water is cheap, electricity is cheap. In Creta, we found out they’re even giving some of them free land. We found a contract that the Congress approved this huge land to be giving to cloud HQ for a data center. There’s a pool of local talent that as we know in the global south, you pay less than you would in the north. And then you have all these local governments that are not asking questions. So we were very skeptical when the secretary told us he wouldn’t know how much water would be allocated to the data centers because we imagine when they traveled to Washington DC to talk to these companies, they must have discussed this, it must have come up. How much water are you going to use? What are your estimates? What is the technology you’re using? So I don’t want to think they’re not even discussing this or they’re not even thinking about these questions. They’re just telling them, come and bring your money. So these are the two technologies that are using these data centers, AI and cloud storage.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I have so many thoughts and questions about this, but I know how busy you are and I can’t keep you for two hours. But I mean it’s so wild to think that it was less than a hundred years ago in 1938 when La Ena nationalized famously the oil industry in Mexico, thus really representing a sort of different governmental mentality and how Mexico was approaching its collective ownership over its own resources. And we’ve had a long kind of windy up and down sort of road from there to here. The government doesn’t even know, is not tracking all this water that’s being promised to these private companies from Silicon Valley. And the sales that are being made are sort of passing through private hands in a way that just sort of really shows you, I think the trajectory of the past century in a state like Mexico and what the kind of privatization, neoliberal and all those big historical forces, what they translate to 80, 90 years later in everything that you and I are talking about here.

But you and I will have to have a follow-up discussion, breaking all that down because there’s a whole lot to dig into there that we don’t have time to now. But I wanted to kind of bring it back to the working people living and working in this area because normally whether it’s the Quila, Dores on the border or these other sort of incentives that states and local governments give to industries to try to bring them them to Mexico, big promises like, oh, it’s going to mean jobs. It’s going to mean economic prosperity for the people here and the people here can provide their labor and expertise in cheaper quantities than you could get north of the border. All that stuff. I wanted to ask, is that even a thing? It feels like, and you guys touch on this in your reporting, the average working person A doesn’t even know that this is happening, let alone how it’s going to impact them, and B, they’re sure shit not going to benefit from it. So could you talk a bit about that, what this all looks like or doesn’t look like through the eyes of local working people in colon. Colon?

Diana Baptista:

One thing, colon is going to be a victim of its own success because you had this deserted area that suddenly it’s becoming the data center valley and you had all these other industries. So you’re attracting a lot of people that are not even from colon. So we’re talking people with master’s or PhD degrees, highly educated people that are not living in small towns of fishermen and people relying on tourism. They’re living in the cities, so they’re bringing these data centers and they’re not even promising that many jobs to begin with. The secretary recognized like 2000 direct jobs, which is very little, to be honest, for such a huge 20 billion investment, 2000 jobs are not a lot. He was mainly excited about indirect jobs and suppliers and stuff like that. So you’re attracting all these people from the cities. So it’s three hours away from Mexico City.

You have these highly educated people traveling from Mexico City or from Queretaro Capital a couple of hours into colon for these data centers and then traveling back. So these are not people from colon to begin with because colon is a series of small towns of fishermen and small farmers and restauranters people with limited educational background, the most vulnerable inner country, the ones that are always left behind because you have to travel, I don’t know, five hours by car to reach LASA community. And you only go there to see the dam and take a little ride on a boat and then travel back to Mexico City. So these are abandoned people to begin with. So we were very interested to see what they thought about this. And I mean, it was funny because you ask them, do you know what an AI is to begin with? Do you know what the cloud is? And for example, 70-year-old Mr. Gu Hernandez who has this blackberry patch of land, he would be like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what AI is.

And what’s interesting is he was very knowledgeable about water inequality. He was very angry telling me he hates that industry comes and that he does not have enough water for his blackberries and that he has to see them die. Meanwhile, he can see these big industries coming to town. So he is aware of what’s happening. He’s just not aware of what AI is. He doesn’t have a phone, he has no idea about cloud storage or anything like that. So it felt like things were happening around him that he was completely unaware of, but also that he was feeling the effect of, so he knew there is new tech, he knew they were coming to town and they would take a lot of water. And the only way he could relate to that was because his blackberries were dying and because it hadn’t rained in two years.

And he showed me how the heat waves burned to them and they were all yellowed and they couldn’t grow because there wasn’t enough water for his crops. We went to this small restaurant next to the dam that received all the stories from year to year. And again, the same story. These are very old people who have no idea about technology, but that will tell you about how water inequality is affecting them and how they find it unfair that the priority is given to the industry instead of them and that they have to have water once a week. So for example, we spoke to this woman who owns a small restaurant next to a dam. The restaurant has no electricity, it has no tap water, so she has to bring everything from her house. So she gets water in her house every eight days. She fills all these water jugs and she carries them on her back all the way to her restaurant. And that’s how she kind of survives the entire week in her restaurant. And yeah, she will tell you she has no idea what AI is, but she knows that she’s struggling and that her business will not survive because there is drought and she doesn’t know the drought is related to the industry. She doesn’t know if these companies are taking the water from her. She does know that new industry coming means she will get less water because of water inequality. That’s a stamp that we have in Mexico because that is how the country operates.

Maximillian Alvarez:

This sadly and morbidly kind of is where your path and mind connected, right on the kind of journalistic quests that we are on to investigate these stories that over here through our podcast we’ve been investigating by talking to working folks, living in sacrifice zones, which is exactly what you were just doing and describing, right? I mean, we may not call it that, but that is what is happening, where the lives and livelihood and the conditions for life itself are being sacrificed at the altar of corporate greed and corporate profits and technological progress that is defined by big tech companies and their supporters in government. And those things become the priorities for government policy. They become the priorities in terms of where our collective resources are being allocated, like water that we all need to live. But that’s where it really does feel to be just intimately connected to what we’ve been investigating here, talking to folks living 20 minutes from where I’m sitting in South Baltimore, black and brown and white working class communities that have been poisoned for generations by rail cars that are blowing coal dust everywhere, trash incinerator, medical incinerator that are just burning up all this stuff and spewing it into the air.

The folks living in east Palestinian, Ohio where that train derailed two years ago or almost two years ago, and they were exposed to all those chemicals and they didn’t know what was on those trains either. They didn’t know the sort of inner workings of the rail industry, but they sure as shit paid the price for all of that when one of those bomb trains derailed in their own backyard. And so I guess I wanted to just sort of take everything that we’ve been discussing here and sort of bring Mexico and places like colon Colon into this discussion of sacrifice zones and what it means to have our societies sacrificing whole communities for the sake of private corporations and serving their needs above ours and what that looks like, right? I mentioned earlier that I wanted us to end up here because when we were talking about the fact that people living in Mexico, everyone gets their water through bottles and these water bottling companies have such a stranglehold on this vital natural resource.

And I think you see something in Mexico that still seems very foreign to a lot of people here in the us, but it’s becoming increasingly less foreign, which is like, what does it look like when I can no longer trust the water coming out of my tap and I have to live on bottled water? If you’ve never done that, trust me when I say it’s a real pain in the ass, it’s a real sort of dystopian reality that folks in East Palestine have talked to us about on this very show. And that’s not something to strive for, but it feels like a reality that we’re just accepting both in areas of the global south that have been experiencing this for years, but also the global working class population. This just feels like the direction that we’re all heading in. So I guess I just wanted to sort of ask, doing this research and this reporting on these data centers, and I guess what do you think this necessarily adds to what our listeners here are hearing when we’re talking to sacrifice communities here in the United States?

Because it’s really important that folks see that it’s not just happening here. In fact, it’s been happening in the global south for a long time and what’s been happening there is coming back home or it’s been happening at home in the global south sides of our population, the poor, black, brown indigenous communities that have been living under these circumstances as well. So I just kind of wanted to give you sort of a last word there, what this has all taught you about that and how the kind of sacrifice zone question, what that looks like when we look at it through the lens of Mexico and stories like the one that you’ve been reporting on.

Diana Baptista:

Thank you. That’s a great question. I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is balance. So this government is making a push to bring Nearshoring to push for Nearshoring in Mexico. They want to tech companies to come to the country because we need more jobs because we have all this pool of highly educated people who need a job and we need all these communities outside of Mexico City to grow. We need more investment. We need to grow economically as a country, but at what cost is that cost, the natural resources, the dwindling natural resources of the country? And where’s the accountability? I mean, for me, the most frustrating part was this opacity from government and companies because maybe it could be the data centers will not take one ounce of water. That could be the truth. But if it’s so, why won’t they tell us?

Why won’t they respond to requests of information? Why will they not give interviews when they’re being requested? Why activists had no idea that there had been a purchase from Microsoft, from somebody who already had a concession. They were in the dark about this. And it’s very frustrating for us to be kept in the dark because then maybe the local government does have good intentions and maybe companies will do some good in the country, but we cannot know that for sure because they’re running on opacity. And that is incredibly frustrating because it also tells us that there’s a lack of regulation in the country for this kind of tech to grow. So we know AI systems will need more data centers, we’ll need more computing power, and they are looking at the global south, especially Latin America for this. But when they come to our countries, why do they come with so much secretiveness?

Why won’t they release the information? Why won’t they be open about their data? So we’ve been told this is because of industry secrecy and stuff, but that’s not enough. That’s not enough for a population who’s already running out of water. There has to be a better effort from companies government to let us know what is being done with our resources. So for me, that was the main lesson that it’s going to be very hard for these tech companies to progress in the global south if they do it with opacity and they do it without releasing the data. We saw it in your way, for example, in Montevideo activists pushed until they got the information and then they refused the data center by Google. And Google has had to change its plans in Montevideo. We saw it in Chile as well with this wonderful story by Rust World.

And we’re seeing it in several parts. Brazil is one of the main markets for data centers in Latin America, for example, where we saw this data, and this has been very frustrating. This has been my main frustration while conducting this investigation. And the second part of it is that we didn’t see that the arrival of new technology to Quero was going to mean any change for the most vulnerable workers in the country. So yes, maybe we attract more highly educated people to this data centers, but in the end, the small farmers and the fishermen and the lady who has no electricity and cooks once in a while for a tourist or two that come into town, they will be just as vulnerable as before. Their income will not change, their opportunities will not change. And all they’re seeing is their environment changing against ’em, which is very sad because one would hope that the arrival of this new companies and all this investment would mean change for the better, for the country’s most vulnerable. But we have not seen that happen yet. So it does leaves us wondering again, where’s the balance? Where’s the balance between economic growth and equality and the protection of our environment? We were very sad to see that there was no data, no answers, and no real change for people who are most vulnerable.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our amazing guest, Diana Baptista for talking with me today. And I want to thank her for all the important work that she is doing. Be sure to follow Diana’s work and follow the link in the show notes to watch Diana’s video report. Forget Jobs AI is Coming for Your Water, which she and Fenton McDonald produced for context, a media platform created by the Thomason Reuters Foundation. And you can read the full text report as well, which we’ve also linked in the show notes for this episode. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes that we’ve published there for our patrons over the years and go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.

Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.