“These big companies think they can enter small villages like ours, take our land, and destroy it.”
- Microsoft is building a data center in Mekaguda, a village in the southern Indian state of Telangana, which is expected to start operations by 2025. About 70% of the construction has been completed.
- Last month, the state government intervened after Microsoft cited problems with the local village council.
- A group of local residents has filed a petition against Microsoft, claiming encroachment and the dumping of industrial waste in a nearby body of water. The court hearing for the petition is pending.
Addition: Why are E-Waste Strategies in Need for Sustainable Data Centers?
E-waste in data centers encompasses a wide array of discarded IT equipment such as servers, power distribution units, and other electronic components that are no longer in use. Despite the rapid pace of technological upgrades, the alarming statistic from the UN forecasts that e-waste volumes could reach 74.7 metric tons globally by 2030.
They’re it going to be dumping servers in the river. They’ll get moved to whatever recycling infrastructure is nearest, or maybe resold on the second hand market. From what the article says, the local economy and farming industry has been in decline since long before Microsoft bought land for a data center. A picture of a stack of pipes, with no verification that they’re even hooked up, aren’t exactly proof of anything either.
It seems to me that this isn’t about Microsoft or data centers, but about the local government versus the wider government. The locals don’t want a data center but the government above their local representation doesn’t care, and has the power to give out permits for this kind of stuff.
I’m sure there’s illegal waste dumping by the construction companies as locals say (which heavy fines or even prison sentences should be handed to), but data centers aren’t exactly chemical plants. There are many other downsides to data centers (such as fresh water consumption during hot summers, which India has plenty of, orthe impact on the local power grid) but as far as I can tell this is a political disagreement/power imbalance spun into an environmentalist story against a Big Bad Foreign Company to gain sympathy.