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Drought-prone region attracts billion-dollar data centres

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Companies, government tight-lipped on water usage

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Locals struggle with rationing, unequal water access

By Diana Baptista and Fintan McDonnell

COLON, Mexico, Sept 6 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A

two-year long drought in the semi-desert municipality of Colón,

in the central Mexican state of Querétaro, has left many

struggling with dead crops and water rationing.

But at the same time, the local government in Querétaro is

giving incentives to companies to build data centres that

generally use large amounts of water to cool their servers.

AI is also set to increase the amount of water data centres

use as the power-intensive processors needed have greater

cooling requirements than conventional servers.

"Querétaro is becoming the data centre valley," the state's

Secretary for Sustainable Development, Marco del Prete, told the

Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Querétaro's conservative governor, Mauricio Kuri, is leading

the drive to attract data centres to Colón, which has drawn $10

billion of investment for new data centres from Microsoft,

Google and Amazon ( AMZN ).

Ana Valdivia, a lecturer in AI at Oxford University, said

companies were "going to places that they feel are welcoming,

first because maybe the governments are facilitating that with

some incentive like tax benefits or land benefits".

Miguel Ángel Carapia, the head of Vórtice IT, a group that

represents tech companies in the state, explained Querétaro was

ideal for data centres because it was safe, near Mexico City and

not prone to earthquakes or other natural disasters.

But both the companies building data centres in Colón and

Querétaro's government declined requests for information about

how much water they would use and what impact that would have on

a population already suffering water shortages.

The arrival of data centres in other water-stressed Latin

American countries, such as Uruguay and Chile, sparked protests.

There are also data centres operating in Mexico City and the

state of Nuevo León, where droughts have fuelled protests over

water concessions that favour big companies over the parched

population.

Microsoft said its data centres in Querétaro would use

technology to reduce its use of water for cooling and would only

consume water "less than 5% of the year".

A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services said it had chosen

"an air-cooled data centre design, which will not require the

ongoing use of cooling water in operations".

Google said it was partnering with environmentally

responsible suppliers that would reduce its water consumption.

While some data centres have become more water efficient,

they still add to the overall demand for the resource, said

Arman Shehabi, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National

Lab, a U.S. federally funded research centre in California.

Environmental activist Teresa Roldán said more data centres

would deepen the water shortage and unequal distribution of

water resources in the region.

"If there is no water for the population, much less will

there be water for the companies," the activist said.

FARMS PARCHED, DAMS NEARLY EMPTY

Fifty minutes away from Colón, La Salitrera is a community

of some 400 small farmers and fishermen that depends on the

tourists who come see two dams between the yellowed hills.

But for more than two years, the Colón area has suffered

drought. From April to July this year, the drought was

officially classified as exceptional, the highest level of water

scarcity.

The dams are now nearly empty and tourist numbers have also

fallen. Water is so low in the dams that fish are not growing

large enough to be caught in the fishermen's nets.

The drought is related to abnormal rainy seasons and

deforestation for cattle ranching, said Ricardo Villarreal, who

runs a reforesting project.

In the market, farmers sell the scarce produce that survived

the heat and drought. Guadalupe Hernández grows blackberries on

a small patch of land and gets water only every 15

days. Sometimes the water is stolen at night.

"I have lost 60% of my crop. With no crop, there's no

money," said Hernández, 68, who sells blackberries to tourists.

Agripina Nieves, who runs a small restaurant by La Soledad

dam, said her home only gets water every eight days.

Using plastic water jugs and containers, Nieves stores

enough water to drink, wash dishes, clean floors and to use in

the restrooms of both her house and restaurant.

"We had never had such water scarcity," she said. "What will

poor people do without water?"

"NO WAY OF KNOWING" HOW MUCH WATER DATA CENTRES USE

In 2020, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced a

$1.1-billion investment by Microsoft in cloud data centres.

Three years later, Microsoft obtained a concession to

extract 25 million litres a year from underground for just one

of its two data centres units in Colón.

That equates to 24% of the water allocated to the

municipality for public and urban use sourced from springs in

the region, according to data by the National Water Commission

(CONAGUA).

A spokesperson for CONAGUA said it had not granted new water

concessions in Querétaro and that Microsoft had legally bought

its concession from another owner.

Water for the data centre will come from the Valle de San

Juan del Río aquifer, which already has a deficit of 56.8

billion litres, a water commission analysis showed.

Asked about how much water was being allocated to the 20

data centres in the state, Del Prete said he does not "have the

data because it is not in my power to request it", but equated

their water consumption to what a restaurant uses in a month.

Apart from the Microsoft concession, water for other data

centres, CONAGUA said, would come from state infrastructure, or

concessions already granted to industrial parks in the region.

"There is no way of knowing how water is being distributed

to those data centres. The only certainty is data centres are

being privileged over the citizens' wellbeing," said Roldán.

(Reporting by Diana Baptista in Colón, Querétaro, and Fintan

McDonnell in London; Editing by Jon Hemming.)