Stop Dirty Data Centres

Neighborhoods are losing green space, drinking water, clean air and nature. Previously protected sites are being earmarked for AI data centre development. Where data centres are built, neighbors suffer from painful noise pollution, increased respiratory disease, intensifying heat islands and worse.

Data centres don’t generate enough jobs and contribute little to the local economy. Despite receiving huge amounts of public subsidies, data centres have a poor track record when it comes to creating jobs. On top of this, the AI services which many are being built to house are directly linked to rising job losses, deskilling of labour, and reduction in worker power.

As energy bills climb for ordinary citizens, fuelled by data centre expansion, governments offer data centre developers discounted energy rates.New homes are delayed or left empty because data centres captured the available energy grid connections. Meanwhile, countless communities face housing shortages, rising rents and overcrowding.

Europe is the fastest warming continent and experiencing record-breaking heatwaves. However increasingly fossil fuels are powering AI data centres, undermining our ability to reduce pollution, meet climate goals and locking us into dependency on dirty energy. Data centres’ huge thirst for fresh water for cooling, greater when the weather is hottest—deprives people and nature of water when they are needed most.

Big tech companies lobby governments to fast-track construction and operate in secrecy, bypassing protections for our communities and ecosystems. Their extreme wealth distorts politics so that our democracies struggle to make independent and informed decisions about data centres in the public interest.

Europe is experiencing a crisis of mental health especially among young people who suffer from social isolation, depression, and anxiety. Research links chatbot usage to self-harm. More AI data centres will fuel more digital services and platforms designed to addict and manipulate us.

Data rights groups are signalling the alarm about what the AI-driven expansion of digital surveillance into every corner of our lives, including public services, will mean for our privacy, data rights and civil liberties.

Data centres are increasingly being used in warfare and surveillance. They provide compute and storage for battlefields abroad and house tools used against civilian populations. Lucrative contracts with the defense sector fill the pockets of foreign tech companies, and under the protection of national security rhetoric, they operate as black boxes without democratic scrutiny and oversight.

In Europe and around the world, mining for critical minerals and manufacturing hardware has intensified, displacing communities and polluting land and waterways. The specialized chips and hardware in data centres are replaced at a breakneck pace every few years and often discarded as harmful e-waste.