‘Water is life’: AI, and the human cost of data centers
On July 10th, Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s government signed deals respectively with US companies Ernst and Young LLP, and Hummingbird AI Holdings, to build data centers - specifically AI infrastructure - in Trinidad and Tobago. Inviting, or facilitating the presence of the US empire in any part of Trinbagonian society has a history of danger for our communities, and the possibility of building data centers represents immense climate, reproductive injustices in our islands.
According to Kamla’s government, these initiatives, along with a deal signed with another US company in the steel industry, would collectively generate at least 5,000 jobs in Trinidad and Tobago. It is as yet unclear where Kamla has the certified information guaranteeing this number of jobs, or where the economic wealth of these deals will actually go. This piece looks at the possibility of data centers being built on our islands, and what that means for our ecosystems.
Data centers require intense amounts of power and resources that are pulled from the environments where they’re built. This is primarily to keep the servers cool, which can be done through water and/or air cooling processes - although most air cooling processes are done by evaporating water. These centers will use such water-intensive practices to operate 24 hours a day 7 days a week. With the quantities of energy and resources used, this costs money…that the companies running these centers do not fully burden, these are financial costs added to the budgets of households in the areas surrounding the actual centers. Areas currently surviving with data centers in their areas report the increased cost of living…when cost of living expenses are already increasing beyond what is possible for households to sustain.
There are at least 11,800 data centers operating globally currently, with at least 5,456 in the US alone. Water is life, and we cannot sustain ourselves without clean water to drink, to bathe, to wash food produce, for hygiene purposes….Water accessibility is even more crucial for our menstrual and reproductive health, which makes the possibility of data centers more alarming for communities already made vulnerable by power dynamics not designed with us in mind.
All which begs the question: what is the actual human cost being signed off in these deals?
“We were promised prosperity but got poisoned air and vanishing water”
The first thing to try and understand is what are data centers, what are they used for, because we all make use of them in our professional and personal lives. If every part of our lives and the services we use have some kind of digital footprint there will be a requirement for data centers. Do you use some kind of phone or computer or device? Some of the internet services you used will be maintained by data centers. You go to a bank to put in your money, or maybe do it online? Or do you need the hospital to keep your records updated digitally as well as on file? You are making use of a data center. These are like exclusively-digital libraries for storing and processing data which are becoming more and more central to how any company or organisation operates. So if we’re all already participating in the demand for data centers, what's an extra one going to do?
The issue comes in when thinking about scale of use and of facility. The data centers used by banks, hospitals, government agencies…these will likely be on the actual grounds of where the main building is, and it will be designed to meet that organisation’s services, including the limitations of their services. These would be called enterprise data centres, that would require an estimated range of 21,600-216k kWh daily to operate. Localised data centres will cost plenty of money to operate, so some companies may outsource that requirement to cloud or colocation data centers, almost like massive storage units where companies can rent storage space for whatever the service is. These, sometimes labelled ‘medium size’ data centers, are estimated to require 1135623.5 L daily to run. In the US, these figures are what a town the size of 10,000-50,000 inhabitants would need in water - unclear whether solely for domestic use, or also for agricultural and industrial use. The massive data centers are the ones we’re hearing more and more about as AI technology expands, hyperscale data centers. These are huge, take up the size of university campuses or bigger and, with estimated figures from US data centers, can extract between 3785411.7 - 18927058.9 L daily (converted from 1-5 million gallons). In other areas where data centers have been developed and currently operate, communities are already confronting the ecosystemic realities of these projects.
Data centers pollute the water, the air, and the soil. In order to operate, they require immense amounts of water which once used are disposed of in toxic ways. The quantity of water required, especially for hyperscale data centers, is drawn from the surrounding natural resources. For instance, Amazon set up a data center in Aragon in northern Spain, later planning to set up a second center nearby. Collectively, these centers would extract 755,720 m2 water/yr, which could irrigate more than 200hectares or 500acres of corn fields, a primary crop in the region. As part of mass industrial operations, data centers pollute the air and noise in the air, by releasing toxic gases and chemicals such as nitrogen oxide and methane, as well as operating with a constant hum recorded of over 95 decibels (well over what is considered a healthy human range), disrupting human, animal, natural life around. These types of hyperscale centers are what are required to expand, develop and maintain AI technology. This technology uses previously existing data center models, but to a completely different intensity and scale, one far more intensive than previous use has required, or even been leading to in an expanding global digital economy. Ways of storing and processing data already required water-intensive practices, but are currently being subsumed by developing AI technologies that are fast increasing.
In January 2026 the current leader of the US empire launched ‘Project Stargate’, a USD$715 million project meant to accelerate the development of hyperscale data center infrastructure in the US and worldwide. The companies that are the leaders in AI technologies and therefore the development of data centers are Amazon, Google, Microsoft. These are corporate giants that all have a record of reproducing labour practices anchored in colonial histories, reproducing imperial strategies of resource extraction, manipulating the gendered and racialised violences of racial capitalism for generating maximum profit, to the detriment of creating massive wastelands in areas and communities considered disposable enough to suffer the injustices of these economic practices. These are also companies that are looking to build more data centers for the use of AI technologies, which require more hyperscale data centers.
“This isn't innovation; it's environmental colonialism on our doorstep”
It is this scale and intensity of demand for data centers that is threatening; extracting water in unsustainable ways, and creating water insecurity for the human and natural ecosystems forced to put up with that infrastructure in their area. Water insecurity threatens the delivery of Water Sanitation and Hygiene [WASH] facilities, therefore directly threatening the capacity for life, menstrual hygiene, reproductive rights for affected communities. Communities that are currently surviving alongside the environmental harms and worsened social injustices due to the physical and industrial presence of data centers nearby are fighting against the consequences of a project they did not ask for: reduced water access and quality, illnesses triggered by air contamination, cognitive and bodily harm to quality of life due to wholescale pollution of their environment. In cities in the US, communities have petitioned their city councils to apply greater provisions protecting them against the exploitation of where they live, some have even sued companies invading their areas to hold these companies up to their practices, so fully dismissive of the basic necessities for human life.
Further, in the research for this piece, what is immediately clear is the insufficient transparency in consistently tracking and recording water and energy consumption of data centers by the companies setting them up. This is entirely deliberate, as that issue has long been pointed out and actual strategies in consistently monitoring and assessing these processes have been requested from within and without these companies. This lack of transparency makes it easier for companies to squeeze through the cracks of actual accountability and hide behind performative initiatives and statements. Further, it makes it more difficult for affected communities to track the water and energy consumption specific to data centers, that is being removed from these communities’ needs themselves. What is clear, is that the arrival of data centers in a neighbourhood comes with a huge cost to the lives, health and well-being of surrounding human life, and natural life. These centers concentrate how extraction of resources works: stripping areas, discharging toxic waste, removing sources of wealth and life for localised communities, violently altering the quality of life of populations in the area.
In Trinidad and Tobago, as in the wider Caribbean, we know what this looks like, our ancestors have suffered these traumas, and we currently experience how deep the roots of these harms rot. The violence of extractive economic and industrial processes that were tried, tested, and modelled on the plantation have not been removed from our soil, our waters, our lives and realities as yet. Not only do our natural environments still bear the trace of these wounds, we are part of societies whose administration, institutions, service infrastructure was designed to police and maintain the violent control of Black bodies. What we inherited upon independence did not fully uproot these systems, which means we still navigate its legacies today. The genocidal foundations of colonisation were shaped and re-shaped to be able to shapeshift into a global model that, as well as being the seeds of modern development, could be co-opted by any body that is entered into its systems. Historically, the Caribbean is the ‘dark laboratory’ for the intersecting and varying forms of these violences; today the living testament of how difficult it is to live without these underlying systems of injustice.
“Neither people nor data can live without water. But human life is essential and data isn’t”
The histories packed into extractive systems show the generations of communities that have survived, fought, died from their inherent violence. In the memory of our communities alone we know the histories of how menstruators, women, queer, Black bodies, suffer the intersections of these violences. Whatever reproduces the same symptoms of these harms, in removing our capacity to provide for ourselves, care for each other within our natural ecosystems, is a part of these violent systems. The deals Kamla’s government signed in July of this year caused serious questions as to what forms of neo-colonisation are being invited into our communities, and who will suffer the most from it. What kind of histories do we repeat when we invite profit for the sake of profit into our households?
Organisations that where possible are documenting the expansion of data centers as its own industry also indicate where alternative practices can be used for the mandatory cooling of servers. For instance, the use of closed-loop cooling processes, which re-uses the same water in a closed circuit. Or the use of alternative water sources - so water that cannot be used for human life - such as non-drinkable water, recycled wastewater that does not take away water for necessary domestic and agricultural use. Communities already fighting the development of data centers are (through their actions) also gradually putting together a blueprint for resisting its harms, by taking legal action, or acting with their political representatives…Here, we have a common ground with the communities in the US that are resisting this development: both our governments are clearly driven by interests that disregard their citizens’ humanity. It is even more urgent to remain informed, aware of what the July 10th deals mean for our islands, especially as we do not have the luxury of space the way the US does. We have our islands, and we must inhabit them so we can live and thrive. What generates waste where we live, makes our quality of life defined by waste and is not compatible with living and thriving. It is an indication of systems driven by the very same thing that founded them: death.