Microsoft AI Data Center Comes for Drought-Battered Mexican Town's Water  (w/ Diana Baptista)
Working People3 Okt 2024

Microsoft AI Data Center Comes for Drought-Battered Mexican Town's Water (w/ Diana Baptista)

As the climate crisis intensifies, billions of poor and working people around the world are suffering from lack of regular (or any) access to clean water, but the dawn of "AI" is about to make the problem much worse. In their recent report for Context, "Forget jobs—AI is coming for your water," Diana Baptista and Fintan McDonnell write, "Artificial intelligence lives on power and water, fed to it in vast quantities by data centres around the world. And those centres are increasingly located in the global south." In Colón, a municipality in Central Mexico that is home to Microsoft's first hyperscale data center campus in the country, working people are already bearing the environmental costs of man-made climate change, and they will be the ones to bear the costs of AI and Big Tech. "The town of 67,000 is suffering extreme drought. Its two dams have nearly dried up, farmers are struggling with dead crops, and families are relying on trucked and bottled water to fulfill their daily needs." In the latest installment of our ongoing series, Sacrificed, Max speaks with Diana Baptista, a data journalist at the Thomson Reuters Foundation based in Mexico City, about Mexico's ongoing water crisis and about the human and environmental costs of AI and cloud computing.

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Featured Music…
Jules Taylor, "Working People" Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

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