This Q&A originally appeared as part of The Guardian’s TechScape newsletter. Sign up for this weekly newsletter here.
The datacenters that power the artificial intelligence boom are beyond enormous. Their financials, their physical scale, and the amount of information contained within are so massive that the idea of stopping their construction can seem like opposing an avalanche in progress.
Despite the scale and momentum of the explosion of datacenters, resistance is mounting in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and in Latin America, where datacenters have been built in some of the world’s driest areas. Local opposition in all three regions has often focused on the environmental impacts and resource consumption of the gargantuan structures.
Paz Peña is a researcher and fellow with the Mozilla Foundation who studies the social and environmental impact of technology, particularly datacenters and particularly in Latin America. She spoke to the Guardian at the Mozilla festival in Barcelona about how communities in Latin America are going to court to pry information away from governments and corporations that would much rather keep it secret.
The Guardian: Could you describe your research?
Paz Peña: Basically, my research is about the positions of governments on datacenters and what the promises are behind them. What are the relationships that governments today in Latin America have with big tech? There’s a lot of lobbying activities around infrastructure and datacenters from big tech to governments in Latin America.
Chile and Brazil are the two top countries working on datacenters today in Latin America, and Chile is one of the countries in Latin America that has a lot of resistance against datacenters.
What the governments are doing – I’m talking about leftwing governments … what they are looking for is foreign investment for datacenters in their countries. The amounts are great. It’s a public policy to attract [datacenters] with what they call national investment plans. They’re doing tax exemptions, for example, in Brazil, which is a huge controversy back there.
In the case of Chile, what they’re doing is actually trying to deregulate the environmental assessments that datacenters are going through.
Carving out an exception for them?
Peña: Exactly. There’s no specific category of environmental impact assessment for datacenters in Latin America. In the case of Chile right now, they are assessed on the diesel that they use, because they use diesel generators for energy. It’s huge amounts of diesel.
The government actually made an administrative change in the environmental system evaluation, where the threshold that datacenters need to achieve on diesel to pass an environmental assessment changed. Magically, that means that datacenters are not going through environmental impact assessments in Chile any more, which was the reason why communities understood what were the impacts of datacenters. They don’t have that information right now.
What we’re seeing is that governments are creating opportunities for investments but not creating rules and regulations for the environmental impacts of datacenters, rules about diesel use, energy and water.
Without that information on datacenters, do you see that the opposition to them is confused or hobbled because they don’t know what it is they’re opposing? Or does it incite more opposition because of the feeling of not being told what’s really going on?
In the case of Chile, I would say that the local activism is quite angry with the leftwing government. The promises of this government was to be an environmental, sustainable exercise of power, right? President [Gabriel] Boric actually said this, that he would form an ecological government. Nobody really believes that. But they put that in the discourse. So you have to pay your words, right?
People are really mad. I would say for two reasons. One is that they don’t have the transparency to understand what is going on in their neighborhoods. The second thing is they are super mad about it because the national datacenter plan, which is, again, a foreign investment plan, is presented for companies – but not necessarily for communities. When they actually publicly presented this plan, which was about two months ago, all the industry was present, but super few people from communities. Communities felt like they were being left out of the conversation.
If there’s a datacenter planned for my neighborhood and I oppose it, what should I do?
In a community, you will find people that understand what a datacenter is and some people will not have an idea of what it is. So when they have heard, they probably heard by two sources: a government’s evaluation system or the media. So once they have heard about this, the main problem they have is, again, transparency. Because corporate secrecy is still super present around the resources that these datacenters need – energy, water, et cetera.
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The problem that we have seen this in Latin America – there’s an incredible example in Uruguay about this – is that governments actually agree with this corporate secrecy. When a community asks for more information, the government is saying: it’s corporate secrecy. We cannot give you that information. So in general, what we are seeing is that communities are considering going to court to actually ask for that information. Because in Latin America, there is an inter-American agreement called the Escazú agreement, which is an environmental agreement about transparency, saying that a government cannot hide this incredibly important information for people.
In the case of Uruguay, they went to court, because there was a Google datacenter being built in Uruguay in Montevideo, the capital. A couple of years ago, they’re going through an incredible drought where the people in Montevideo had to shower with buckets of water.
Meanwhile, the government announced that this Google datacenter, where the amounts of water needed would be immense. So people were asking if this water, this very scarce resource, should be going to Google or to people. This is a fair question.
They didn’t know exactly how much water Google would need. So they asked the government. The government said no. The environmental minister said: no, you cannot have that information because it’s corporate secrecy by Google. So they went to court, and they won, actually. The court quoted the Escazú agreement.
When a community takes a public stance saying we want more information about this and that, and social and environmental impacts, the impression is that they are opposing progress, technological progress, economic progress. Corporations, and I will say, sadly, governments – they see communities as a kind of roadblock.
The first thing people need is information, and the first hurdle that they confront is the lack of information. So I would say that the first step they need to take is to find any source of information, and sometimes go to court. The majority of these actions are not successful, but they are sometimes the only way that corporations but also, sadly, governments give the information to the people.
If you lose the fight, what should you do then if you’re a member of this community?
For some communities in Chile that I interviewed, big tech companies weren’t actually the enemy, which is very interesting. Datacenter plans were seen as sort of an opportunity to raise the bar of environmental measures, because the people in those communities are surrounded by so many bad corporate actors who pollute a lot and don’t even care. It’s not necessarily a movement against big tech. Not yet, I would say. Maybe later.
For now, these communities see a tech company planning a datacenter as not as a bad actor, actually as a strategic opportunity to raise the bar of environmental care and measures in their own neighborhoods. Big tech companies have this necessity of being the good player in the world, or at least being seen that way, so there is an opportunity for people to say, ‘Big tech has raised the bar of environmental care. So let’s try to put some sort of pressure to the other bad actors.’
The enormous amounts of money and the physical scale of these things are so huge. They seem to operate on this inhumanly large level. How do people believe in their own opposition to these projects? They’re so massive that it kind of seems like you’re just saying no to an earthquake.
In general, people who are working against datacenters are people who have a background working on environmental issues. It’s people really used to the big fight. It’s people that really understand how difficult it is to deal with corporations and with governments.
