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

Working People

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.

Additional links/info below…

• Diana’s Context author page and X page

• Fintan McDonnell & Diana Baptista, Context, “Forget jobs. AI is coming for your water (Video Report)”

• Fintan McDonnell & Diana Baptista, Context, “Thirsty data centres spring up in water-poor Mexican town (Text Report)”

• David Berreby, Yale Environment 360, “As use of A.I. soars, so does the energy and water it requires”

• Tamara Pearson, The Real News Network, “Indigenous Mexicans risk their lives to defend the environment from organized crime and ‘insatiable, predatory’ transnational corporations”

• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “In Brazil, the climate crisis is already turning working people into climate refugees”

• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “East Palestine residents have been left behind—and they're running out of water”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!

• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page

• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page

• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music… Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez Post-Production: Jules Taylor