Why build data centres when drinking water is scarce? HRF asks govt

Hyderabad: The Human Rights Forum (HRF) urged the Revanth Reddy government to suspend artificial intelligence (AI) data centres, owing to the severe water shortage in Telangana.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, October 27, HRF questioned the government’s encouragement to set up more and more data centers despite a looming water crisis linked to El Nino conditions.

“The Chief Minister recently warned that drinking water will be unavailable. If the government cannot ensure water for agriculture or even guarantee adequate drinking water for its people, what conceivable wisdom is there in inviting notoriously water-guzzling hyperscale AI data centers into the state?” read their statement.

“Such a grotesque inversion of priorities exposes the hollowness of the government’s claims to be acting in the public interest,” HRF questioned the rationale behind inviting water-intensive data centre projects.

It also raised concerns over the power requirements of the proposed facilities and asked how the government planned to meet the additional demand without affecting households, agriculture and other productive sectors.

It called on the government to establish whether the proposed data centres were justified in a water-stressed State and to ensure that their resource requirements would not undermine drinking water security, agriculture or ecological protection.

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