Data centre boom comes with steep health and climate costs
Data centres are powering health advances at a rapid pace, but the industrial scale of their expansion threatens communities around the world. Behind AI’s gleaming image sit growing concerns about the pollution and economic fallout of vast water and energy usage.
Data centre power usage is expected to increase to 219 gigawatts over the next five years, with LMICs bearing the greatest environmental burden. Photo: Tieu Giang
Ironically, it would take a high-functioning AI programme to find the vital connection uniting Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, the culture-rich Canelones Department in Uruguay, and the rolling hills of northern Virginia in the US. All are steeped in natural beauty carved by millennia of geological development, but their current viral appeal is being fashioned by the scalpel edge of technology in the form of huge data centres powering the AI revolution.
The dependency-forming rapid response to our internet search and prompt requests—ranging from online consumerism to game-changing drug discovery—come at a price rarely considered by the everyday user. Each task undertaken by an AI model is routed through vast data centres packed with graphics processing units (GPUs) that generate heat, requiring energy and cooling on an industrial scale; one estimate put the electricity needed for the 5.1 trillion AI queries per year at 15 terawatt hours—the equivalent to the annual output of two typical nuclear reactors.
AI’s image is that of a clean and gleaming technology but this is an industrial boom whose global data centre power usage is expected to increase to 219 gigawatts over the next five years—enough to power roughly 180 million homes. Observers believe low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) will bear the greatest environmental burden of this rapacious pursuit of computing capacity, with worrying flow-on consequences for health.
The people versus AI data centres
Campaigners are battling hard across Africa and South America to repel data centres that are packaged in an economic profile hard to resist even in energy-limited nations.
Microsoft’s US$1 billion project in Kenya’s Rift Valley recently stalled because the government admitted the huge centre would suck up almost a third of the nation’s energy generation before reluctantly suspending the project.
In drought-stricken Uruguay, a public protest moment was needed to persuade the government and Google to reshape its plans for a massive data centre near Montevideo after it was revealed it would siphon off vital drinking water supplies.
The issues for LMICs are compounded by the fact that many of these countries are the source of the raw materials used to manufacture processing chips, an industry that already causes environmental and healthcare damage. They are also often in dire need of the economic investment promised by big tech expansion plans.
Threat from data centres
The Earthkeepers vs AI Empires symposium in Lusaka, Zambia, in May, brought together global sustainability, environmental, and climate change experts and activists to frame the threat to LMICs from data centres. It stated: “The energy that powers these machines is drawn from landscapes where communities have been displaced by dams, mines, and vast development projects in service of feeding extractive economies. Even the cables carrying data follow paths shaped by centuries of imperial trade, conquest, and resource extraction.
“Across Africa in particular, territories once stripped for gold, diamonds, and oil are again being targeted; this time for the copper, cobalt, lithium, and other minerals needed to build and operate the AI empires.”
The need for minerals and materials as part of data centre infrastructure elucidates historical ties with imperial trade, conquest, and resource extraction in LMICs. Photo: Arthouse Studio
Enol Nieto, senior technician of governance for sustainability at the University of Central Catalunya, Barcelona, attended the landmark meeting and shared his experiences at the sharp end resisting Google’s Uruguay project that was cloaked in secrecy until he and Daniel Pena, a researcher and lecturer at the University of the Republic, Montevideo, challenged the government.
“Daniel spotted the data centre project on an Environment Ministry webpage and we started to investigate,” Nieto says. “I was living in Uruguay at the time, and it was a very difficult moment with the drought and losses of access to drinking water. There is human right to have access to water, so the data centre was in direct conflict with that.”
When government ministries failed to respond to queries, Nieto says he and Pena turned to public information requests and judicial proceedings with the support of a pro bono lawyer. The process revealed that Google's planned data centre would consume an estimated 7.6 million litres of water a day. “This in a country with drought,” Nieto remarks.
According to Nieto, public disclosure of the figures sparked outcry and helped galvanise a social movement around water. Opposition to the country's first proposed hyperscale data centre became one of the movement's central demands, with protesters taking to the streets for days. He says the public pressure pushed both the government and Google to revise the project, reducing its scale and replacing the planned water-based cooling system with electric cooling. Water will only be used for servicing bathrooms, kitchens, and fire safety on site.
“We should be able to discuss what model of data centres we want with transparency and all the information available. Europe is more advanced in its resistance processes and that may help the global south fight against exploitation.”
While Nieto describes the changes as a significant victory for water conservation, he argues the data centre will still place substantial demands on the country's energy supply—a challenge that is “everywhere”.
“We managed to change a project and to generate awareness about the materiality of the digital cloud on Uruguay society—that we see as a partial victory,” Nieto says, adding that in countries like Spain “they are targeting depopulated areas”. “We are seeing developments in the Aragon region, in the north-east, that would use nine times the existing power used by the communities that live there. We are very concerned about the impacts on them and the environment.”
Nieto advocates for a global “moratorium” on the construction of data centres “until we know completely what the impacts will be”. “We should be able to discuss what model of data centres we want with transparency and all the information available. Europe is more advanced in its resistance processes and that may help the global south fight against exploitation,” he says.
A moratorium on data centres
The moratorium demand is echoed around the world. Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland campaigner Kierra Box highlights a jeopardy corroding communities, the environment, and climate change resistance: “The short-sighted scramble for AI is undermining our efforts to decarbonise and mount a global struggle against climate change.”
She says the “danger of data centres comes from their enormous energy and water usage”, explaining that a large data centre can use between four and 20 million litres of water per day—equal to consumption in 28,000–130,000 homes—and the same amount of electricity as half a million UK households annually.
“Some planned data centres may have good renewable energy proposals but most will either have on-site fossil fuel generators or require more oil and gas from the grid to meet their huge energy needs,” Box says. “There is far too little transparency at the moment [and] their expansion is outstripping regulation and political scrutiny. If we don’t get a handle on it, then [data centres] will proliferate and the environment will suffer.”
“There should be a pause to think about why we are building data centres and who is benefitting. Only then should data centres be built more sustainably, with community consent.”
Box highlights that the environmental and social impacts of data centres extend far beyond the facilities themselves, especially in LMICs. “When we look at the longer supply chain feeding data centres, the raw materials that are in the computer chips are extracted from the global south—whose communities already bear the brunt of the impacts of pollution and human rights abuses we've known for years are linked to making batteries, microchips, and the infrastructure for data centres.”
Friends of the Earth groups around the world are raising concerns that governments, especially across Africa and Latin America, are struggling to balance environmental protections with the economic incentives offered by major technology investments. Box says this creates a risk that data centres could be developed in communities without adequate safeguards, amplifying existing environmental and public health issues.
“There should be a pause to think about why we are building data centres and who is benefitting. Only then should data centres be built more sustainably, with community consent, rather than chucking them in what are essentially in sacrifice zones,” she asserts.
Transparency needed to reduce health risks
The US—home to the world’s largest concentrated data centre hub in Virginia—is at the forefront of data centre expansion and the vanguard of health concerns around their energy and water use along with light and noise pollution experienced by surrounding communities.
Research projects have highlighted healthcare concerns that noise and light pollution from data centres can cause hearing and sleep issues, while air pollution can increase rates of respiratory diseases and cardiovascular conditions.
Air pollution from data centres can increase rates of respiratory diseases and cardiovascular conditions, increasing hospital admissions and asthma-related outcomes. Photo: cottonbro
An air pollution analysis by Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health concluded that emissions from the on-site gas turbines at one data centre in Virginia could result in an estimated 3.4 to 6.5 additional premature deaths and increased hospital admissions and asthma-related outcomes.
A 2026 paper, which stressed that the public health impact of data centres is under-examined, found they could cause 600,000 asthma symptom cases and 1,300 premature deaths along with other morbidity outcomes in 2028 if the data centre expansion rates continue at a high level.
“We cannot just adopt wholesale a new technology, and one at this scale, without thinking through the public health consequences of it, or the equity issues that it creates.”
Alison Steele, executive director of the Environmental Health Project, a non-profit public health organisation in Pittsburgh, which has been identified as offering prime data centre development opportunities, believes that greater transparency from tech companies is a critical component of enabling the assessment and mitigation of health risks both in high-income nations and LMICs.
“We cannot just adopt wholesale a new technology, and one at this scale, without thinking through the public health consequences of it, or the equity issues that it creates,” she says.
“Data centres are continuously lit and produce a hum while they are operating, and research shows that low-frequency noise and light pollution contribute to stress levels, sleep disruptions, and mood disorders. There are added air quality issues from the fossil fuels powering data centres, either from their co-located power supply or the grid itself. There are health impacts along the entire supply chain and power generation journey that need to be considered.”
Local opposition
Local opposition has delayed or halted 75 data centre projects worth approximately $130 billion in the US with opposition groups mobilising effectively across 49 states, according to a Data Centre Watch report. It states: “As the data centre pushback becomes mainstream, opposition is extending beyond grassroots groups in communities hosting new developments, drawing in statewide organisations, advocacy groups, and national voices focused on energy, water, land use, and ratepayer impacts.”
As the counter-data centre movement gathers pace in countries like the US, there will likely be concern that it will displace tech expansion plans to LMICs where companies might have an easier regulatory ride. But the global environmental campaigning community is determined to share intelligence, resources, and tactics to protect all under-threat regions and slow the data centre onslaught.
“This is a critical time for the global north to join forces with global south and mobilise around data centres.”
Major tech companies say they are listening and are committed to environmental sustainability. Google notes its “moonshot is to power our operations with carbon-free energy, every hour of every day, on every grid where we operate”. Microsoft says of its AI data centre buildout: “As we expand capacity, these systems are where many of our sustainability commitments are put into practice—from reducing electricity, water, materials, and emissions impacts to working with partners on carbon-free electricity, grid resilience, value chain emissions, and carbon removal.”
There are calls for greater transparency from tech companies and governments regarding the projected public health and environmental impacts of data centres. Photo: Brett Sayles
Kierra Box, of Friends of the Earth, observes: “This is a critical time for the global north to join forces with global south and mobilise around data centres. We need to examine why we need these data centres, what they are being used for, and how to ensure they do good rather than harm.”
She advocates for greater transparency from tech companies and governments. “We need clear investigations into projected environmental and public health harms and these to be the first and foremost considerations. And we need decisions to be made with, not for, local people, shared so that we can build a system that benefits communities in all nations.”
