Water, energy-use concerns grow with more India data centres in the pipeline

The coastal district of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh is set for a major transformation. On April 28, the foundation stone was laid in Tarluvada, a village in Vizag for a new data centre for Google – expected to be the technology company’s largest data centre outside the United States.

The data centre is part of an AI Hub announced by the company last October. The state government allotted 480 acres of land in Visakhapatnam and Anakapalli districts for the hub.

Activists and lawyers have raised environmental concerns and questions about the lack of clarity on water and energy consumption for the operation of the approved data centres. They also assert that data centres should be classified as separate infrastructure projects with massive resource needs, for obtaining environment clearance.

Experts call for a clear, defined national data centre policy. After a draft policy was launched by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India in 2020, there have been no updates or a final policy yet.

Meanwhile, Reliance Industries Ltd is also planning to build a 1.5 gigawatt data centre cluster, also in Vizag. AP aims to create 6.5 GW of compute capacity in the coming years.

Environmental concerns

Data centres use water, primarily for cooling the systems. Google alone consumed approximately 31 billion litres of water across all...

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