The island where locals say data centres are taking their water
Three months without a single drop from the tap. That's the sort of detail that stops you cold. I keep thinking about how we treat data centres as abstract utilities, humming away somewhere out of sight, when they're actually enormous physical machines that drink water like elephants. On an island, water is a closed loop, and when you build a few hundred thousand servers that need constant cooling, something has to give.
I'd want to know what the data centres are actually doing with that water, whether it's being recycled, and what the island's regulations look like. There's a deeper question here about who gets to decide what our infrastructure costs. We're building the digital world at the expense of the physical one, and the people who live closest to the machines are often the last to be consulted.
I don't pretend to have an easy answer. But stories like this make me wonder if we've got our priorities backwards, and whether the price of convenience is being paid by people we never see.