Thirsty data centres spring up in water-poor Mexican town

A two-year long drought in the semi-desert municipality of Colón, in the central Mexican state of Querétaro, has left many struggling with dead crops and water rationing.But at the same time, the local government in Querétaro is giving incentives to companies to build data centres that generally use large amounts of water to cool their servers.AI is also set to increase the amount of water data centres use as the power-intensive processors needed have greater cooling requirements than conventional servers."Querétaro is becoming the data centre valley,” the state’s Secretary for Sustainable Development, Marco del Prete, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.Querétaro’s conservative governor, Mauricio Kuri, is leading the drive to attract data centres to Colón, which has drawn $10bn of investment for new data centres from Microsoft, Google and Amazon.Ana Valdivia, a lecturer in AI at Oxford University, said companies were "going to places that they feel are welcoming, first because maybe the governments are facilitating that with some incentive like tax benefits or land benefits”.Miguel Ángel Carapia, the head of Vórtice IT, a group that represents tech companies in the state, explained Querétaro was ideal for data centres because it was safe, near Mexico City and not prone to earthquakes or other natural disasters.But both the companies building data centres in Colón and Querétaro’s government declined requests for information about how much water they would use and what impact that would have on a population already suffering water shortages.The arrival of data centres in other water-stressed Latin American countries, such as Uruguay and Chile, sparked protests.There are also data centres operating in Mexico City and the state of Nuevo León, where droughts have fuelled protests over water concessions that favour big companies over the parched population.Microsoft said its data centres in Querétaro would use technology to reduce its use of water for cooling and would only consume water "less than 5% of the year”.A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services said it had chosen "an air-cooled data centre design, which will not require the ongoing use of cooling water in operations”.Google said it was partnering with environmentally responsible suppliers that would reduce its water consumption.While some data centres have become more water efficient, they still add to the overall demand for the resource, said Arman Shehabi, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, a US federally funded research centre in California.Environmental activist Teresa Roldán said more data centres would deepen the water shortage and unequal distribution of water resources in the region."If there is no water for the population, much less will there be water for the companies,” the activist said.Fifty minutes away from Colón, La Salitrera is a community of some 400 small farmers and fishermen that depends on the tourists who come see two dams between the yellowed hills.But for more than two years, the Colón area has suffered drought. From April to July this year, the drought was officially classified as exceptional, the highest level of water scarcity.The dams are now nearly empty and tourist numbers have also fallen. Water is so low in the dams that fish are not growing large enough to be caught in the fishermen’s nets.The drought is related to abnormal rainy seasons and deforestation for cattle ranching, said Ricardo Villarreal, who runs a reforesting project.In the market, farmers sell the scarce produce that survived the heat and drought. Guadalupe Hernández grows blackberries on a small patch of land and gets water only every 15 days. Sometimes the water is stolen at night."I have lost 60% of my crop. With no crop, there’s no money,” said Hernández, 68, who sells blackberries to tourists.Agripina Nieves, who runs a small restaurant by La Soledad dam, said her home only gets water every eight days.Using plastic water jugs and containers, Nieves stores enough water to drink, wash dishes, clean floors and to use in the restrooms of both her house and restaurant."We had never had such water scarcity,” she said. "What will poor people do without water?”In 2020, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced a $1.1bn investment by Microsoft in cloud data centres. Three years later, Microsoft obtained a concession to extract 25mn litres a year from underground for just one of its two data centres units in Colón.That equates to 24% of the water allocated to the municipality for public and urban use sourced from springs in the region, according to data by the National Water Commission (CONAGUA).A spokesperson for CONAGUA said it had not granted new water concessions in Querétaro and that Microsoft had legally bought its concession from another owner.Water for the data centre will come from the Valle de San Juan del Río aquifer, which already has a deficit of 56.8bn litres, a water commission analysis showed.Asked about how much water was being allocated to the 20 data centres in the state, Del Prete said he does not "have the data because it is not in my power to request it”, but equated their water consumption to what a restaurant uses in a month.Apart from the Microsoft concession, water for other data centres, CONAGUA said, would come from state infrastructure, or concessions already granted to industrial parks in the region."There is no way of knowing how water is being distributed to those data centres. The only certainty is data centres are being privileged over the citizens’ well-being,” said Roldán. — Thomson Reuters Foundation