India is entering all AI data centers. Environmental costs will have to wait

The sprawling site in central New Delhi where India is hosting a global conference on the impact of artificial intelligence was packed with tens of thousands of people this week, as top tech leaders from OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Google’s Sundar Photos descended on the capital.

This year’s edition of the AI ​​Impact Summit was the first to be held in a developing country, and India hailed it as a forum for business deals and discussions on how to expand investment here.

Some 300 Indian entrepreneurs have taken the opportunity to develop low-cost AI tools to solve everyday problemslems, but there was little focus at the conference on the possible downsides of AI expansion — including the impact of large data centers on water and energy.

Data centers, which are central facilities that host computer servers, IT infrastructure and other equipment needed to store digital data, require a lot of water and energy for cooling systems.

India’s current data center infrastructure, set to grow as tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google pour billions of dollars into the country’s AI sector, are in places where resources are already scarce.

The city of Hyderabad in southern India, for example, is expected to have a water shortage of 909 million liters per day for domestic and industrial use over the next two years – and yet Amazon is expanding its data center there.

Microsoft plans to build its AI center in fast-growing Pune, southeast of Mumbai, where persistent water shortages last year led to protests against local officials.

While companies are exploring energy-efficient ways to cool their AI machines, many activists said there isn’t enough information publicly available to know exactly what impact AI data centers could have on water-scarce India.

“We don’t have full information about what technologies [the companies are proposing],” said Shalu Agrawal, program director at the Delhi-based think-tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW). “We need disclosure frameworks.”

Hoping to be a growth market for AI

Despite all its technological talent, India has been seen as a laggard in the development of artificial intelligence. But the country is trying hard to secure a place in the global AI system and position itself as the next big growth market.

The South Asian country produces about 20 percent of the world’s knowledge but only 3 percent of it is stored.

“It looks like in the next two years, it should sees more than $200-billion in revenue [US] investment in all five layers of AI,” Indian Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said at the conference.

India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, whose face is on dozens of billboards around the capital promoting the conference, also spoke of AI capabilities in his speech on Thursday, as he positioned his country as a key player in techno.development and distribution of the log.

“India is not afraid. India sees fortune and a future in AI,” Modi told a gathering of technology leaders and dignitaries.

Forward at the conference, Google, Amazon and Microsoft had already pledged a combined $68 billion in AI-driven projects across India, with a focus on cloud computing and new or expanded data centers.

Google is spending $15 billion to build an AI center and data campus in Visakhapatnam, a coastal city in eastern India’s Andhra Pradesh state, in partnership with two of India’s largest conglomerates, Adani Group and Bharti Airtel. It will be the company’s largest AI hub outside the United States.

There is no national policy framework

India is now the third most competitive AI country in the world, behind only the US and China, according to the report. latest data compiled by Stanford University.

The development of Indian data centers is still in its early stages, but the commConsolidation concerns are growing over the existing water and energy challenges that can come with multiple, round-the-clock data centers.

India lacks a national policy framework to guide data center development and emphasizes corporate planning on how the centers will use water and energy, say analysts – even though energy and water consumption by India’s data centers is expected to more than double by 2030, according to CEEW.

“At the national level, we have policies and guidelines to attract more investors,” CEEW’s Agrawal said, but the focus seems to be more on supporting the growing industry than stopping it.

Regulations are left to state governments, where officials also have a vested interest in seeking investment and giving tech companies tax incentives, Agrawal said.

Only five of India’s 15 states have data center development policies that even mention sustainability-related issues in their guidelines, CEEW analysis is shown.

S&P Global research also recently predicted that more than 60 percent of India’s current data centers will have to face water stress in this decade due to limited resources.

A study conducted by the Indian government’s research arm NITI Aayog concluded that fresh water demand for AI data centers could be as high as 1.7 billion liters next year.

Canadians have the same concern: Solomon

Apart from technical officials, the Delhi conference attracted world leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

CAnada’s first AI minister, Evan Solomon, was also in attendance, as the country looks to strengthen ties with India and increase investment in technology and energy after several years of strained diplomatic relations.

Solomon acknowledged that Canada is also dealing with the impact of data centers and questions over transparency in AI development.

“Canadians want to know: ‘Does water have power?'” Solomon told CBC News in an interview at the conference. “‘Does it consume electricity? Will this affect my electricity bill?’

However, the potential environmental impact of the explosion of data centers was not front and center at the conference.

“I don’t see much attention being paid to that conversation,” said Arpita Kanjilal, a researcher at the Delhi-based nonprofit Digital Empowerment Foundation, which works to close India’s digital divide.

He spent months talking to people in communities affected by the growing demand for an AI data center, particularly in the south-central state of Telangana, another region where Microsoft is expanding its data center.

“Whose land is taken, by whom, by price, first q“Uestion” residents near the data centers are asking, Kanjilal said, as concerns grow about losing prime agricultural land.

In August 2023, a group of 56 farmers and local residents filed a lawsuit in the Telangana High Court against Microsoft India and a number of other companies and government agencies, alleging that they illegally occupied more land than was proposed for their data center and that they dumped industrial waste in a nearby lake.

Kanjilal said that there is little awareness among local people in India ovthat there is an interruption of the water supply or an increase in the pressure of the local electricity supply.

When officials talk about other data centers, Kanjilal said, the discussion should include “accountability questions about land, water, energy and the promise … to provide jobs to people in the community.”