AI Data Centres Will Eat You Alive

“Our toilets won’t fill because of the Amazon, across the road,” one resident told researcher Laure De Tymowski, about living close to the Amazon data centres in Tallaght, County Dublin.
Another complained about the noise. “In the summer you have to leave your windows closed to keep the sound out.”

Excessive noise and massive water consumption are two major problems that data centres impose on a community. But there’s lots more too.

With their high security fences, and often aggressive security, these giant warehouse-like buildings look and feel as intimidating as prisons.

Their energy consumption is enormous. And because they are such a drain on the national grid, they often require huge supplementary onsite energy sources including gas plants and dirty, back-up diesel generators.

Green they most certainly aren’t.

CONSTRUCTION COSTS

Data centre water demand is exploding around the world. At the same time, we are suffering an historic level of drought. It is so extreme that – even as Tehran mines water-guzzling Bitcoin – Iranian authorities have announced they will have to move the entire city because their wells are running dry.

That’s a city of 8.7million inhabitants.

Globally, this is a major crisis, which is intensifying in real time. We are pumping so much groundwater now that we are drying out entire continents. Much of this water – often filled with toxins – ends up in the sea, raising sea levels.

We have pumped so much water since 1970 we have literally altered the earth’s tilt. Since 1970, we have done three times more damage to our environment than the previous 8,000 generations of ‘modern’ humans combined.

But the prevailing official view seems to be that “it’ll be grand”, especially in little ol’ Ireland, with our clever politicians, our rainy days and our cold weather. They thought that too, in rainy Uruguay. They had so much water there, that they decided to write access to it into their constitution as a fundamental right. Then the droughts came.

“Montevideo was the first capital in the world to arrive at ‘day zero’ and run out of potable water,” according to environmentalist Eduardo Gudynas. Meanwhile, the Uruguyan government was promising a Google data centre all the water it needed. “No es sequia, es saqueo!” became the slogan of the local community. “It’s not drought, it’s pillage!”

Eduardo Gudynas

Data centres create huge quantities of waste heat: it is a very popular case study, in favour of data centres, to show how this heat can be used to keep local communities warm. Such was the innovative, award-winning and well-publicised Tallaght District Heating Scheme, launched in 2023. So far, only public buildings are being heated, though there are plans to connect it to housing developments.

While the initiative is clearly positive in its intent, there is a fly in the ointment. Amazon data centres are rated at 83 MW – in theory enough to power 180,000 homes for a year – which all eventually appears as waste heat. To date, the district heating system harvests at most 1% of this. The rest is gone. They may be able to significantly increase that percentage. But for now at least, the mitigation by Amazon is negligible.

The majority of the construction costs were borne by the Irish government and European Union, with Amazon giving access to some of its land.. The total cost was over €8 million. As yet, no economic analysis of the heating system seems to be available and so the question of value for money remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, 250 metres from the Amazon data centres, one member from the Traveller Community reports having to keep a small gas heater running all the time during the winter...

SHELL COMPANIES

Finding out about who paid for what, who will benefit, and what the true costs are, has not been easy for Laure De Tymowski, who has been researching the impact of data centres in Ireland.

“Access to information and transparency are very poor in Ireland,” she said. “Any bit of meaningful information I was able to access came from freedom of information requests (the unredacted parts!).”

It’s no wonder that Ireland is a prime destination for data centres, with over 90 now operating here, devouring about one quarter of Ireland’s total electricity. Big Tech loves Ireland. “Because of the state of complete servitude of our public institutions towards data centres,” De Tymowski argues.

Aurora Gómez Delgado helped found Spanish activist group Tu Nube Seca Mi Río (Your Cloud Is Drying My River). “Lack of transparency is their strategy,” she explained of Big Tech and data centres. “They lie all the time.”

Big Tech is constantly on the hunt for global weak spots. They search for rural areas suffering economic crises that have enough cheap land, water and electricity to keep a data centre going for 5-10 years. Then they drain everything, leaving behind a parched desert. This is how Big Tech operates, with no allegiance to anything other than the fast buck.

They often come in secret, with front companies, forcing politicians to sign stringent NDAs – and then move with lightning speed to get everything signed up. They flood the local media with positive jobs stories. “Our movement has had media coverage all over the world, but we struggle to get coverage by the local media,” Gómez Delgado explains. “So the local communities are being lied to about lots of jobs and lots of development. And it’s just not true. 18,000 jobs were promised, but it’s not more than 50 jobs.”

In Ennis, Co. Clare, the promise of jobs, development, innovation and technology hubs, hang heavy in the air. An enormous data centre is planned for just outside the town. As with so many data centre developments, no one knows who is really behind it.

The “developer” is a shell company, called Art Data Centres Ltd. The director of this company is also director of thousands of other shell companies. This data centre will consume 200 MW of electricity. To put this into context, the entire country of Clare consumes about 70 MW.

You can imagine the conversations. “It’s ok, lads, they’re only demanding 80 MWs from the grid.” The other 120 MW will apparently be delivered through onsite “natural” gas or some sort of future energy innovation that will be net minus zero. Clare currently uses its 70 MWs to employ about 56,000 people. With 200 MWs, this data centre will employ a couple of hundred max.

MISERLY JOBS PROVIDER

Once up and running, this mega data centre will be emitting 567,000 tons of CO2 a year. Or is it 500,000 tons? Or maybe with some imaginative AI calculations it’s a measly 292,000 tons?
It doesn’t matter.

As of 2025, there are 90 some data centres in Ireland, consuming an estimated 27% of Irish electricity, producing who knows how much CO2, and draining – well, what quantity of water? It’s a trade secret.

Big Tech collects all our data, steals our intellectual property, and we get to know nothing about how it operates.

It seems to be government policy that Irish people should be as badly informed as possible about the true social and environmental impact of data centres. At present, under the Aarhus convention, where judicial reviews, taken to test the validity of planning permissions involving environmental issues, are concerned, individual citizens are protected against costs (even if they lose).

Now, however, the government is proposing to limit the costs refundable even to successful judicial review applicants. The government wants to make citizens liable. It’s typical. Micheál Martin off in the Amazon spouting hot air, while back home he’s rubbing his hands as he signs up for Liquified “Natural” Gas.

Meanwhile, Irish people are paying among the highest electricity prices in Europe.

In the USA, electricity prices are surging. Now, a link with data centre development has been identified.

“In at least three States with high concentrations of data centers, electric bills climbed much faster than the national average during that period,” CNBC reported. I was told by an expert on Irish electricity pricing how difficult it is to get information on the impact of data centres. “The energy consumption of data centers has tangible repercussions for Irish families,” the website LowerEBill stated. “Rising operational costs are often passed down to households.”

The Irish government absolutely loves data centres because these environmental monsters are a bright light for GDP. The environmental reports written about them are as (un)truthful as AI. Is there a single data centre in Ireland that has even one climate impact identified? Not that I know of.

When issues are raised, hands are waved. We’ll solve it all with “renewable” energy and other innovations, half of which haven’t even been thought of yet. Thus, the great con of “renewable” energy is used to legitimise endless consumption and non-stop growth.

Still, the people of Clare are getting some bargain, eh? All they need to do is find a spare 80 MW.

Providing such massive amounts of electricity to such a miserly jobs provider will have consequences for years to come. As has happened elsewhere, local businesses that provide vastly more jobs and that need electricity to expand, won’t be able to get it because there won’t be any electricity left. Building more homes will have to be put on hold.

THE SAME OLD LIES

“One of the big myths is that data centers will be key for revitalization,” anthropologist Livia Garofalo explained. “But once the data centers are built, it only takes about twenty people to run them.”

Tania Rodríguez is an activist from Chile. “They come to our country and talk about thousands of jobs,” she says. “This is a big lie. They say that there will be a tech hub around the data center, and there’s nothing. It’s just ugly warehouses. They tell us they need these data centers for development. All of these extra data centers are for the Global North. They’re not for us. This is neo-colonialism; taking our natural resources.”

Chilean author, activist and researcher, Paz Peña, uncovered plans for 32 new data centers in Chile, delivering a total of 906 jobs. “That’s less than 30 jobs per data center,” she said. “There no correlation with the level of tax breaks they get, and the amount of resources they use. And this tech hub they promise? There is no evidence for it. The local economy does not benefit.”

Querétaro, Mexico, has suffered a veritable onslaught from the USA.

“We’ve been invaded by data centers,” activist Teresa Roldan Soria explains, with grim humour. “The data centers have the privilege to be in spaces that have water access. But they want to give the people ‘regenerated’ water. They named the state the paradise of data centers, but it’s the State of Extinction, because we don’t have water.

“We have to fight the government,” she said.

In July, the Valle de San Juan del Rio aquifer, from which the Querétaro data centers draw, recorded a deficit of 56.8 billion litres. Querétaro is an example of data colonialism. Strategically well placed and located to meet the data needs of North America, it is being sucked dry and turned into a desert for the lazy convenience and deep fake videos of US citizens.

AI data centre buildout is turbo-surging across Latin America, according to Callaway Climate Insights, accelerating at twice the rate for the rest of the world. AI energy demand “could cripple Latin America’s already weakened energy grid within the next 10 years,” Michael Molinski wrote for Calloway.

In Ireland, our grid can’t keep up with voracious data centre demand. We’ve had to resort to net electricity imports from the UK, heading towards 20% of supply.

Of course, for countries struggling to create more growth, data centers are full of short-term positives, and for economic growth our environment must always be made suffer. Laís Martins, a reporter at The Intercept Brazil, told Mongabay about how “the Brazilian Environmental Ministry had been completely sidelined from discussions on the national data center policy, led by the Finance Ministry. More than 80 meetings were held in Brasília, the capital, on the topic but the Environmental Ministry was not present in even one.”

TOXIC WASTE

In 2025, they’ve taken to feeding the voracious data centres with coal, oil, gas, anything they can put their hands on. Coal is seeing a resurgence and nuclear power has become “clean”, “green” and cool again.

Close to the Grand Canyon, in Arizona, on Navajo and Hopi lands, they’ve restarted the Pinyon Plain uranium mine. Here, uranium mining has already contaminated water, polluted soil, and caused multiple cancers, birth defects, destroyed herb sites for traditional practices, and desecrated sacred sites and burial grounds. The Navajo Nation has over 500 abandoned uranium mining sites. And yet, poisonous uranium-laden trucks roll again across Indigenous lands.

AI, the Great Big Lying Machine, has exploded everything. A 2025 AI data centre can demand 10 times more power, water and materials than a centre in 2020. In the next five years, AI data centers may require more than 600 terawatt-hours of power – as much as the entire of Canada. By 2027, Global AI water demand may be somewhere between 1.1 to 1.7 trillion gallons of water. That’s four to six times Denmark’s total annual water consumption.

“This represents a fundamental shift in data centre water consumption patterns,” Dashveenjit Kaur wrote for Cloud Computing. Why? An AI data centre is a supercomputing centre rather than a place to store data. The processing generates intense quantities of heat in super-compressed spaces. Water is a much better conductor of heat than air, and is thus the only way to take the intense heat away from the servers. This, of course, demands intricate piping and lots more materials, driving a general surge in demand for metals.

Copper, with its notorious environmental record, is used in multiple stages of AI infrastructure. It is estimated that to meet this, “renewable” energy and other demand, we may need to mine as much copper in the next 25 years as in all of previous history.

AI is also driving a surge in e-waste, the fastest growing – and among the most toxic – wastes in the world.

DATA COLONIALISM

Meanwhile, data centres and “renewable” energy have created a classic marriage of convenience. The theory was that “renewable” energy would be used to transition economies away from fossil fuels.

However, students of energy history will know that there has never been an energy transition.

Driven by the AI boom, and the mining boom for “green” metals, we are digging more coal today than ever. We are pumping more oil and gas. In Brazil, as they plan new oil wells for the Amazon, there are examples of “renewable” energy projects being set up with the specific objective of attracting data centres to an area.

“The Northeast of Brazil is a big producer of renewable energy, mostly wind but also solar,” Laís Martins told me. “The problem is: there is a distribution bottleneck. In this sense, data centers seem to be the perfect solution, coming in as new consumers for this surplus of energy… experts have been alerting that, instead of an energy transition, data centers will justify an increased demand in energy generation.”

A prime target for data centre development is the city of Caucaia, in the state of Ceará, in the northeast of Brazil. Although close to the Atlantic Ocean, Caucaia has had regular states of emergency due to drought. This does not deter the data centres who are attracted by the fact that Caucaia is located right beside major international undersea data cables.

Big Tech aims to have its data stored and processed in Caucaia, using up energy and precious water, while serving up the data to customers in the Global North. “This policy does not benefit the national tech sector,” Laís Martins told me, “nor does it advance Brazil’s digital sovereignty agenda, which would reduce our dependence on big tech actors. We are handing over our natural resources, water, land and energy, and financial resources, in the form of tax breaks, for the benefit of foreign tech companies. It repeats a colonial logic of resource extractivism.” (Of what’s stored in the 90 data centres in Ireland, how much do you think is Irish data? Maybe 1%.)

MASSIVELY OVER-HYPED TECHNOLOGY

AI data centre construction has the US economy bulging on a diet of crack cocaine level growth. 80% of US stock market gains came from AI in 2025. A scary super-concentrated ten AI stocks account for 40% of the stock market. This is unprecedented.

Traditionally, US consumer spending dictated the health or otherwise of the US economy. In 2025, the construction of US data centers was so massive that it became the key engine of economic growth. Globally, it’s planned to spend a French economy size worth of money on AI in a couple of years. All for a highly unreliable, lie-spewing, massively overhyped and unprofitable technology, built on super-expensive computer servers with ultra-short useful lives. What could go wrong?

Back in Tallaght, the most marginalized and energy-deprived communities are facing another cold winter with no heat support yet from the award-winning data center heating. In the government press releases and the gushing media, Amazon is presented as this benevolent, kind patron. The story on the ground is very different.

There used to be a community centre in the very place where the innovative waste heat system was built. When Amazon acquired the site, water and electricity for the community centre were immediately cut off. The Club chairperson said they were “bullied out of the building,” as the gates were locked. In a nicely choreographed and widely publicised PR move, money was donated to local children’s charities in lieu of compensation for the Club. But the members attempt to get the Club relocated were ignored by the tech giant. The Club, which was the centre of many people’s lives, was gone.

One more local community sacrificed at the altar of Big Tech. And the all-consuming data centres becoming ever-more-dominant.
The time to challenge this narrative is now.

• 99th Day: A Warning About Technology by Gerry McGovern will be published on 1 Feb 2026.