AI data centres require significantly more power, they generate intense heat, require highly specialised networking and power distribution, and massive cooling systems.
Published Oct 19, 2025 | 10:42 AM ⚊ Updated Oct 19, 2025 | 10:42 AM
Data centres are highly automated and once operational, they create only a few hundred long-term positions, most of which are highly specialised technical roles filled by external recruits. (AI-generated image)
Synopsis: The data centres in Andhra Pradesh will require a large number of construction labourers. Once the construction is over, the centres would need very few workers. The “massive” job opportunity will be for constructing the necessary infrastructure, not for the data centre.
Amid claims of “landmark development” and “landmark agreement”, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu did not forget to laud his son and IT Minister Nara Lokesh for bringing Google’s massive data centre complex to the state.
What was forgotten — or overlooked deliberately or not — was the fact that the American multinational tech behemoth had recently withdrawn its claims to carbon neutrality. It conceded that achieving its net-zero targets by 2030 will be a challenge.
Not all were enchanted by the euphoric claims — by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai to Naidu to Lokesh — raised after the tech giant signed an agreement with the government of Andhra Pradesh for establishing the data centres. The Human Rights Forum (HRF) was one among them, which went beyond the claims and saw a potent danger.
On Saturday, 18 October, Andhra Pradesh got its first taste of data centre activism, a direct offshoot of environmentalists’ concern over generative AI systems gobbling up more and more resources.
Data centre activism is not new to the world, though it may be a novelty in India. Rural America has seen data centre activism as AI developers scouted far and wide for cheap land and tax breaks. Local communities, apprehending the danger, rose in arms against data centres.
In Portugal, Antonio Costa had to step down from the office of the prime minister last year following allegations of corruption linked to the Sines 4.0 data centre. The Netherlands, Mexico, Uruguay and the UK, too, witnessed inflamed tensions over data centres. In Chile, Google halted its plans for a data centre over water use concerns.
On 14 October, Google announced its largest AI hub outside the US in Andhra Pradesh.
This was after Andhra Pradesh had taken up with the Union government Google’s key concern—taxation stability—while offering incentives and a business-friendly ecosystem.
Transparency gets sidelined when politics joins business interests for a tango. Local participation in decision-making or formulating data centre policies is given a by, even as corporations seldom open up about the centre’s water and energy consumption.
According to the BBC, data centres are vast warehouses that house stacks of computers that store and process data used by websites, companies and governments. The boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has skyrocketed the demand for more data centres. The reason is that AI requires more computing power.
A recent report — Data Centres Outlook – Global — by business analysis firm Moody’s said the “demand for data centre capacity to support artificial intelligence, cloud computing and data storage services will intensify in 2025”.
The same report has warned of “data centre projects to face resistance in some markets”.
“Public concerns about data centres’ urgent need for massive amounts of electricity will increasingly come to the fore. Even as state and regional governments continue to offer tax incentives to attract new data centres, the industry is coming under greater political and regulatory scrutiny. Despite growing public pushback, large data centres will continue to proliferate in established markets and spread to new markets. While political and regulatory actions threaten to limit the supply of data centre capacity in some markets, legal restrictions on the use of certain social media platforms or the training of AI models have the potential to constrain demand as well,” Moody’s reported.
Herein lies the concern of environmentalists. AI data centres require significantly more power, they generate intense heat, require highly specialised networking and power distribution, and tonnes of water to prevent the overheating of servers.
The BBC reported that data centres powering AI in Scotland were using enough tap water to fill 27 million half-litre bottles a year.
This is the one of the reasons for HRF’s concern over the Andhra Pradesh government’s decision to enable the construction of a massive Google-Adani Data Centre complex in Visakhapatnam and Anakapalli districts.
Massive data centres are notoriously water and energy-hungry, consuming billions of litres annually for cooling and maintenance across the world.
In Visakhapatnam, where groundwater depletion, erratic rainfall and climate variability have already created acute water stress, such a project will almost certainly intensify the crisis, diverting precious water from residents and amounting to a grave injustice.
Experiences from similar projects, such as Google’s Data Centre in Uruguay, show that these facilities often generate toxic waste, emit greenhouse gases and deliver negligible local benefit.
Given Visakhapatnam’s hot climate, the proposed complex would require even more water-intensive cooling systems, further lowering groundwater tables and risking contamination of local water sources through chemical runoff and waste discharge.
Another critical concern is energy consumption. A one-gigawatt facility would demand enormous amounts of electricity, equivalent to powering a mid-size city with lakhs of homes, straining an already overburdened grid. Google’s claim that this hyperscale facility will run on 100 percent renewable energy is technically untenable and is a false assertion. The State’s grid cannot supply uninterrupted renewable power without fossil-fuel backup, which makes the project’s so-called ‘green’ credentials a deceptive façade.
In reality, data centres of this scale depend heavily on fossil fuels during peak demand, thereby generating massive carbon emissions and undermining global climate goals.
On 25 February 2025, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an article, The AI Data-Centre Boom Is a Job-Creation Bust. “Tech and political leaders tout them (data centres) as an employment bonanza, but data centres need very few workers in very large spaces,” the article said.
The data centres in Andhra Pradesh will require a large number of construction labourers. Once the construction is over, the centres would need very few workers. The “massive” job opportunity will be for constructing the necessary infrastructure, not for the data centre.
“Data centres have rightly earned a dismal reputation of creating the lowest number of jobs per square foot in their facilities,” WSJ quoted John Johnson, chief executive of data-centre operator Patmos Hosting.
HRF, too, has raised the issue. “Data centres are highly automated and once operational, they create only a few hundred long-term positions, most of which are highly specialised technical roles filled by external recruits. Local employment will be temporary and low-skill, limited to construction and routine maintenance work,” it said.
The Forum then pointed out the repercussions. “The claims of indirect employment are also bogus since data centres are closed, machine-driven facilities — a warehouse of computers – that have negligible linkages to the local economy. What Vizag and Anakapalli will inherit instead are the externalities like energy burden, pollution, land loss and social displacement.“
What about the economic benefit? The bulk of it will flow outward to global investors, infrastructure conglomerates and distant corporate supply chains headquartered elsewhere.
Still, the Andhra Pradesh government has been benevolent. It has extended an extraordinarily generous package of non-fiscal and fiscal incentives to Google in the form of tax exemptions, land allocation and discounted tariffs and reimbursements for water, power and infrastructure amounting to an astounding ₹22,002 crore over 20 years.
It is, however, not known if the government has carried out a proper study on the data centres — financial benefits to the state, the specific number of jobs the centres would create post the construction phase, their impact on the environment, and if there are threats of privacy invasion, as Amnesty International has detailed.
If not, time will mark Andhra Pradesh’s benevolence as a landmark blunder. And it won’t be as sweet as the famed Anakapalli jaggery.
