Tu Nube Seca Mi Río (Your Cloud Dries Up My River) is a group that organizes against data centers in Spain. We spoke to Aurora. She is a psychologist and has worked as a developer of open-source software.
The group started three years ago, after they realized that a data center from Meta was being planned near them. Their region has a desert climate and is short on water. She said she initially got worried because she saw the opposition that was happening in the US and in Chile.
In the past, their region had only tiny data centers. They belonged to universities or small companies. Then, a lot of hyperscale data centers were planned. They used much more compute and needed much larger, water-based, cooling systems. The companies say they don’t use a lot of water, but the residents don’t believe it. This area of Spain is extremely dry, and Aurora says that when she started talking to people living next to the proposed data centers, everyone was concerned about the data center’s water usage.
She first got involved when a data center from Meta came to Talavera de la Reina. Shortly after that, they realized that 34 data centers were planned in her province Aragon. They then found similar numbers of planned data centers in the Cataluña and Madrid regions, and more in other regions.
The first project they found, in Talavera de la Reina, was actually the same project as what had been tried before in Zeewolde, Netherlands. In the Netherlands the project was cancelled after opposition from residents. Aurora says there, the local newspaper was really brave and published critical reporting about the data center. But, in Spain, the local newspapers haven’t done that. She says the people in the Netherlands have formed a coalition against the data center, and then voted in a politician, and managed to get a moratorium. She says there are a lot of anti data center activists in the Netherlands, and she is in contact with them daily.
Tu Nube Seca Mi Río is first trying to show the situation. Aurora says that there is only very little information available. She says one of the problem that many rural people in Spain speak Spanish and some rural language, but not many people speak foreign languages. Because of this, they don’t have access to all the information about what happened with data centers in other countries.
Besides making the information available, they are also involved in strategic litigation against the data center projects. There is a law that allows large projects to be built if it is in a rural area, causes no environmental or social damage, and provides a lot of jobs. This law is being used by data center developers as well. But, she says, only the first of those conditions is true for data centers. So, they are suing to get the projects cancelled.
The opposition usually comes in waves. She says that usually, a young person living in the city finds out that a data center is planned in the town where their parents are living and they call them. In the rural places where the data centers are being planned have an older population with many retirees. Once they understand that their town is being sacrificed for a data center, they become very angry.
So far, only one data center has been built, by Amazon. But she says that is already a problem because when the first comes in, the laws are changed, and a lobby is established, and after that many more can follow.
Now, most people in Spain are against the data centers. Aurora says that now when a new data center gets planned somewhere, somebody finds out and calls them, and then there is resistance against the data center, before construction is started. Data centers are much easier to stop before construction has started, she says.
Tu Nube Seca Mi Río has created a script that searches certain government websites for information about new data center projects, so they can find out about them as soon as possible. Once they find something, they call someone in that region that is already involved in another fight, such as against large-scale farming, and tell them that a data center is being planned near them. Then, they explain what a data center is and what the harms are.
In the South of Europe and the North of Africa, there are already large problems with lack of drinking water. During recent droughts, hundreds of Spanish villages and cities didn’t have drinking water. The droughts are alternated with floods. But the floods come too fast, and the water cannot be retained in the ground. She says that during the floods, a lot of shrubs grow really fast, and then immediately dry out and die thereafter. This can then easily start wildfires. This is a large problem as well, and a large portion of the landmass of Spain has burned out in previous years. Data centers make this worse by using extra water.
The data centers also cause heat islands. Because they have put asphalt all around a large area, and there are constantly machines running, this creates heat and warms up the surrounding area. People living close to it suffer because of this, because the air is even hotter during summer, especially at night. Summers in Spain are very hot, and people close their windows and shutters during the day. At night, they open the windows, but if you live next to a data center, it produces a lot of noise, and pollution, and heat. So some people then can’t even open the windows at night.
In Spain, the data centers get preferential energy and water contracts. This means that if there is a drought, the water will go to the data center instead of the residents. Aurora says this is terrible because people need water to survive, but we don’t need AI at all.
And although some claim that the data centers don’t use a lot of water, Aurora seriously doubts that, because ‘if that was the case, why don’t they make the exact numbers public?’
She says the companies hide the exact numbers. Even the chief of the United Nations has called for transparency about the environmental costs of AI.
According to a leaked document obtained by The Guardian, Amazon was strategizing to keep the water usage of data centers a secret.
Another problem is that the data centers need water for cooling at the same time that residents need it most as well: during summer. The summers in Spain have gotten longer, says Aurora. In the past, summer [temperature] was only 15 days a year. Now it is almost half the year. Sometimes it is more than 30 °C (86 °F) at night. If it is more than 21 °C (70 °F) at night, it is impossible to sleep, she says. She says that now even in Spain, people are thinking about climate migration, and rich people often go to their properties in the North of Spain during summer because it is a bit cooler there.
There have been a lot of large green energy projects in Spain. And people have generally accepted them because it is clean energy. But now, the data centers are using energy from those sources and claim to be ‘green,’ while everyone else is back on fossil fuels.
Aurora doesn’t believe the claims the companies make about their data centers being water-positive. She says they at most buy certificates from some other region and say they are water-positive, but this doesn’t help with the local river. She says Amazon did a large greenwashing campaign in Aragon, but at the same time, they asked the local government for permission to use four times as much water. Their excuse was that Aragon was too hot and they couldn’t keep to their commitments. But, she says, of course it’s too hot. It’s in a desert. A large part of the data centers being built in the US, are also being built in environments with water scarcity.
Just like in the U.S., opposition against data centers is an issue that brings together people from all sides of the political spectrum. Aurora says ‘when people get a letter from their local government telling them that they have been expropriated because a data center is coming to town, people just burst in flames. It doesn’t matter which political party they voted for.’ She says that people in the countryside have often been there for generations and don’t want to move. On top of that, they usually get only a very small amount of money for their house and property.
Tu Nube Seca Mi Río works together with a lot of different groups such as teacher groups and labor unions. They have a different focus, but there are commonalities. For example, the hyperscale data centers are mainly for AI, which will be used to replace jobs, and many teachers are worried about the effects of children relying on AI.