The sprawling site in central New Delhi where India hosted a global summit on the impact of artificial intelligence was packed with tens of thousands of people this week, as major tech leaders from OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Google’s Sundar Pichai descended on the capital.
This year’s edition of the AI Impact Summit was the first to be held in a developing country, and India touted it as a forum for business deals and conversations on how to expand investment here.
Some 300 Indian entrepreneurs took the opportunity to promote cheaper AI tools to solve everyday problems, but there was little focus at the summit on the potential downsides of AI expansion — including the impact of giant data centres on water and energy supplies.
Data centres, which are centralized physical facilities that host computer servers, IT infrastructure and other equipment needed to store digital data, require large amounts of water and energy for cooling systems.
India’s current data centre hubs, which are set to expand as large tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google pour billions of dollars into the country’s AI sector, are in areas where resources are already scarce.
The city of Hyderabad in southern India, for example, is projected to have an acute water shortage of around 909 million litres a day for both domestic and industrial use in the next two years — and yet Amazon is expanding its data centre there.
Microsoft is planning to build up its AI facility in rapidly growing Pune, southeast of Mumbai, where consistent water shortages last year led to protests against local officials.
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While companies are exploring more energy-efficient ways to cool their AI equipment, most activists said there’s not enough publicly available information to know exactly what impact more AI data centres would have on water-scarce India.
“We do not have full information on what technologies [the companies are proposing],” said Shalu Agrawal, director of programs at the Delhi-based think-tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW). “We need frameworks for disclosure.”
Hoping to be AI growth market
Despite all its tech talent, India has been seen as lagging in artificial intelligence development. But the country is trying hard to secure a place in the global AI system and positioning itself as the next major growth market.
The South Asian country generates nearly 20 per cent of the world’s data but only three per cent of its storage.
“It looks like in the coming two years, we should be seeing more than $200-billion [US] worth of investment across the five layers of AI stack,” Indian Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said at the summit.
A visitor plays with an Addverb robot at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, India, on Feb. 19. (Bhawika Chhabra/Reuters)
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose face is on countless billboards around the capital advertising the summit, also talked up the potential of AI in his remarks on Thursday, as he pitched his country as a central player in the technology’s development and deployment.
“India is not scared. India sees fortune and a future in AI,” Modi told the gathering of tech leaders and dignitaries.
Ahead of the summit, Google, Amazon and Microsoft had already pledged a combined $68 billion US for AI-driven projects across India, concentrating on cloud computing and new or expanded data centres.
Google is spending $15 billion to build a massive AI hub and data campus in Visakhapatnam, a coastal city in India’s eastern Andhra Pradesh state, in partnership with two of India’s largest conglomerates, Adani Group and Bharti Airtel. It will be the company’s largest AI hub outside of the United States.
No national policy framework
India is now the third-most AI-competitive nation globally, behind only the U.S. and China, according to recent data compiled by Stanford University.
The boom in Indian data centres is still in its early stages, but community concerns are growing over the potential for water and energy challenges that could come with more data centres, which operate around the clock.
India doesn’t have a national policy framework to guide data centre development and to insist on company transparency over how water- and energy-intensive the centres will be, analysts say — even though the energy and water use of India’s data centres is expected to more than double by 2030, according to CEEW.
Participants walk the floor at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi earlier this week. (Salimah Shivji/CBC)
“At the national level, we have incentives and guiding principles to attract a lot of investments,” said CEEW’s Agrawal, but the focus seems to be more on supporting a growing industry than curbing it.
Regulations are left to state governments, where officials are also more interested in angling for investment and offering tax incentives to tech companies, Agrawal said.
Only five out of the 15 Indian states that have policies on data centre development even mention sustainability-related issues in their guidelines, a CEEW analysis showed.
An S&P Global study also recently predicted that more than 60 per cent of India’s current data centres will have to deal with high water stress this decade because of limited resources.
A study produced for the Indian government’s research arm NITI Aayog concluded that the demand for freshwater from the country’s AI data centres could be as high as 1.7 trillion gallons by next year.
Canadians have similar concerns: Solomon
In addition to tech grandees, the Delhi summit attracted world leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Canada’s first AI minister, Evan Solomon, was also in attendance, as the country looks to strengthen ties with India and increase investment in technology and energy after a couple of years of strained diplomatic relations.
Evan Solomon, Canada’s minister of artificial intelligence, attended the AI Impact Summit in Delhi. (Salimah Shivji/CBC)
Solomon acknowledged that Canada is also grappling with the impact of data centres and questions over transparency in AI development.
“Canadians wanna know: ‘Is it water-intensive?'” Solomon told CBC News in an interview at the summit. “‘Is it energy-intensive? Will this have an impact on my electricity rate?'”
And yet, the potential environmental impact of an explosion of data centres wasn’t front and centre at the summit.
“I don’t see as much attention being paid to that conversation,” said Arpita Kanjilal, a researcher with the Delhi-based non-profit Digital Empowerment Foundation, which works to bridge India’s digital divide.
She has spent months speaking to people in communities affected by the surge in AI data centre demand, primarily in the south-central state of Telangana, another region where Microsoft is expanding its data centre footprint.
“Whose land is being taken, by whom, at what price, is the first question” residents near the data centre sites are asking, Kanjilal said, as worries over losing prime agricultural land grow.
In August 2023, a group of 56 farmers and local villagers filed a court case before the Telangana High Court against Microsoft India and dozens of other companies and government bodies, alleging they illegally occupied land beyond what was proposed for their data centre and that they disposed of industrial trash in a nearby lake.
Arpita Kanjilal, a researcher with the Delhi-based non-profit Digital Empowerment Foundation, said there isn’t much attention being paid to the environmental costs of India’s AI investments. (Salimah Shivji/CBC)
Kanjilal said there is less awareness among local populations in India over the possibility of disruption to the water supply or increased pressure on local electricity supply.
When officials talk about more data centres, Kanjilal said, the conversation has to include “questions of accountability for land, water, power and even the promise … of giving jobs to people in the community.”
