NEWS | A new industry report says Asia Pacific will spend $280 billion building data centers between now and 2030. That would make it the fastest growing data center market in the world, second only to North America in total size.
Even with all that growth, the region still does not have enough. Asia Pacific has 60 percent of the world's people but only 22 percent of the world's data center space, and the Philippines is one of the countries most behind. Even after new capacity opened in the past year, demand grew faster than supply, and there is already more building planned on top of that.
BMN thinks the region is moving fast without asking the right questions first. A single large data center can use up to 5 million gallons of water every single day just to stay cool. In the Philippines, the proposed Pax Silica project alone is expected to need 39 billion liters of water and enough electricity to power a small city every year, and local groups warn it could push out around 20,000 Aeta families and farmers from their land. In Thailand, farmers and fishers near new data centers are already worried about the same thing, less water left for their crops and rivers once these facilities start pulling from the same supply everyone depends on.
Jobs and investment sound good on paper, and they really can help. But that benefit usually shows up fast, while the real cost, like dried up water sources, lost farmland, and higher electricity bills, shows up slowly and hits the people who had no say in the deal the hardest.
So before more of these projects get approved, is anyone actually asking the farmers and families living next to them if they are ready for what gets taken away, not just what gets built?
Your picture beside a comment comes from Gravatar, matched to the email you signed in with. Set one there and it appears here; without one you get your initials. How we handle this