In Visakhapatnam or Vizag, a city on the south-western coast of India, a movement against large-scale AI data centers is growing, as more people in the community are mobilizing against the projects due to possible impacts on their lives and the local environment.

People in Vizag have already organized several protests and public meetings to raise awareness about the projects, comparing their possible economic benefits to the costs involved, such as the drying up of their water resources, pollution, and rising temperatures.

Last month on July 19, scores of local people and activists took to the streets in the city to oppose the data centers and demand they be withdrawn. Protestors claim they will harm their access to essential resources, such as water, electricity, and clean air, once fully operational.

Security forces arrested leaders of the left parties and other activists who went to express solidarity with the people facing displacement and scarcity of water due to the upcoming nearby data center in Tarluvada in the city on August 6.

Police also disrupted an awareness campaign launched by the activists for the visitors of the Vizag beach last Sunday, August 9.

The activists organized under Stop Vizag Data Centers, the Human Rights Forum, and other such groups have organized several conventions and public meetings both in-person and through social media nonetheless.

As part of their efforts, the organizers have launched a petition demanding an immediate halt to work on the already sanctioned projects and greater popular involvement and transparency in the matter. Despite the lack of broader public awareness around AI data centers in the country, the refusal of mainstream media to talk about them, and the government’s active attempts to silence all forms of resistance, around 16,000 people have signed the petition already, within a month of its launch.

Environment impact and living conditions

The Andhra Pradesh government has already approved several AI data centers totaling a capacity of 6.5 GW in the state mostly around the Vizag city.

A large number of these data centers are being built around ecologically sensitive water bodies and hills surrounding the city.

The Google-Adani data center is one such project with an overall capacity of 1 GW split into three different sites, with the largest being a 512 MW data center at Adavivaram-Mudasarlova water reservoir.

Activists claim the Mudasarlova Reservoir, which is 120 meters away from the data center, is already drying because its catchment area was vandalized, trees were felled, and land was cleared even before the government gave them the necessary environmental clearance.

The clearance was provided within days last month, however, leading to more trees being felled. The government also declared different approval processes with other companies to construct their own data centers are underway. Reliance Industries and Sify Infinite Spaces are seeking to build data centers ranging between 500 MW to 1.5 GW capacity.

The data center boom in Andhra Pradesh comes as the government of India is promoting policies to incentivize data center construction, seeking to capitalize on the widespread rejection they are facing in Europe and North America as an opportunity to make India a hub for such investments.

The government of India has given a 20-year tax exemption to all such investments and completely removed the need for environment clearances for most of the projects.

Some of the proposed data centers, such as the one by Amazon in Thane, Maharashtra, which is also facing popular resistance, have been classified as “essential services” by the state government meaning it will get priority over common people in the supply of water and electricity during shortages.

In Vizag, most of these projects are located near the hills surrounding the city and would lead to both deforestation and hill cuttings fundamentally changing the local environment.

“Mudasarlova is a critical drinking water source for the city and construction at this site threatens natural water flows into the reservoir,” the petition has claimed further saying “large-scale hill cutting, deforestation and intensive construction threaten the city’s water security, biodiversity and environmental stability.”

There are also concerns about various forms of hazards created by these data centers including the noise pollution and rising temperatures due to constant use of large processors.

Demands of prioritizing people over profit

The government however, continues to downplay the possible impact with state’s chief minister Chandrababu Naidu recently calling the campaign against the data centers as “fake.”

He also tried to mislead the people by claiming that three new data centers approved recently with over 2.5 GW capacity in the state would only need 3.5 TMC water without acknowledging the fact that this would be half of all the water consumed by over 4 million residents of the Vizag city.

The petitioners also claim that, once built, 6.5 GW AI data centers would consume as much electricity as the entire state of Andhra Pradesh, with around 54 million people, consumes today.

The petition claims that the “enormous demand for land, water and power [these projects make] risks overwhelming regional infrastructure and accelerating ecological degradation on an unprecedented scale.”

The petitioners demand all environmentally destructive activities related to the projects such as hill cutting, land clearing and excavations must be halted immediately along with public disclosures of all relevant information related.

They also push for a comprehensive cumulative environmental impact assessment of all proposed data center projects in and around Vizag and “protection of reservoir catchments, forested hills, wetlands, coastal ecosystems and other ecologically sensitive areas from resource-insensitive industrial development.”

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