Of bots, watts, and water

Growing opposition to data centres in the US and Europe could create opportunities for India, but high power and water consumption, limited job creation and local resistance pose significant risks.

Between October 7 and 11, Ukraine launched successful drone attacks on three major data centres in Russia. All three centres were run by “Russia’s Google”, Yandex. The attacks caused significant physical damage, resulting in global traffic attributable to Yandex falling by 99 per cent on October 12 before recovering to 85 per cent of normal levels by October 14.

 

According to some data analysts, one outcome of Yandex going down was a decline in right-wing troll and bot traffic across social media. Organisations like Germany’s AFD Party and the United States’ Republican Party are said to have suffered loss of engagement for a few days. However, other analysts say malicious bot traffic just relocated to other Cloud service providers.

 

Yandex, as mentioned above, is referred to as Russia’s Google even though it had just $20 billion in revenue in 2025, which is minuscule compared to Alphabet’s $402 billion. But Yandex does offer a similar portfolio of services. It runs a (regime-friendly) search engine, hosts websites (and bots) on its Cloud, and offers email services, among other things. It also offers the services of Yandex AI, which is described as “an all-in-one mobile assistant, search engine, and chatbot app… which combines real-time web search with generative AI capabilities into a single interface.”

 

Data centres are required for all this. They run AI, back up, process and analyse data, and host Cloud services. They also consume vast quantities of power and water. They employ very few people. A multi-billion-dollar data centre may employ less than a dozen.

 

Quite aside from performing dodgy functions like hosting bots and troll factories, data centres have become a contentious issue in America’s midterm elections due to their infrastructure footprint. Ginormous power and water consumption translates into pressure on local infrastructure and potentially, higher tariffs. Lack of local employment generation equates to a lack of rationale for tolerating local data centres. There’s also been enough publicity about AI eating jobs to generate fears of net job losses as data centres proliferate.

 

Opinion polls suggest this dislike is bipartisan: US voters dislike data centres regardless of political affiliations. It’s turned into what’s called a NIMBY (not in my back yard) issue. By some accounts and according to some polls, more Americans would be comfortable with a nuclear power plant than with a data centre in their zip code. (Incidentally, the power demands of data centres could result in more investments in nuclear plants.)

 

New York has a moratorium on data centres and another 14 US states (some red, some blue) are considering bans or moratoriums. Recent reportage suggests that in addition to the fears of elevated tariffs and negative employment impact, US citizens are less than happy about potential loss of privacy. Many also suspect that local politicians were “on the take” because many data centres got favourable terms and some were set up under non-disclosure agreements.

 

Will the American dislike for data centres lead to a halt in AI deployment? No, of course not! Data centre projects are being located all over the world and the pace of data centre capex is supposed to accelerate, on paper, at least. But there’s resistance in other locations as well. Some 70-odd projects are now delayed across Europe due to local NIMBY resistance.

 

This antipathy will probably be presented as a great opportunity for digital India. There are already several Indian mega data-centre projects in various stages of planning and execution and more projects could relocate out of the First World.

 

What could go wrong? Well, India is far more stretched than the US or the European Union when it comes to power and water resources. Indians will not be suspicious about politicians collecting kickbacks for large projects; they will take it for granted.

 

Corruption is tolerated where there’s some apparent benefit, such as in the tender for a new road where easier commuting is a payoff. But a data centre doesn’t create many benefits and may indeed lead to net employment losses and deterioration in local power and water resources. So, corruption could become a sore point.

 

Is it far-fetched to imagine a backlash? Indians have objected to port projects, copper smelters, nuclear plants. They might object to data centres.

 

Looking at it cynically, protests that slow down projects may actually do India a favour under some circumstances. If the AI bubble does burst, investments into data centres will have to be written off. A project that aborts early, for whatever reason, will lose less money. 

 

The writer is a New Delhi-based independent journalist.