Today I learned that there is an AI data center being built in the Indian city of Raipur, where I used to live.

Raipur is very hot (Wikipidia says the record high is 47.9C), and I'm pretty sure that doesn't take the effect of humidity into account. It wasn't always this hot, but it gets a little worse each year and that has added up.

The majority of the city's electricity is sourced from coal power plants, and for a variety of reasons its grid is not especially stable, with particularly frequent blackouts during the rainy season. That often means that there's no AC during the most humid and second-hottest time of the year.

It is dry year-round except for those few months of monsoons, when the local groundwater reserves are replenished. Despite the intensity of those storms, there have been progressively worse water shortages every year. I've done a lot of rooftop gardening there to reduce the urban heat island effect, and I've watched all but the most heat and drought-resistant plants wither and die. At times water was being brought in by tanker trucks and there just wasn't enough for both human use and the whole garden.

I find it difficult to imagine a worse place to build an AI data center, and yet here we are. They are going to burn coal to power the AI chips and cooling rigs during heat waves and water shortages that are already literally deadly to the people living there.

This is the sort of thing people are justifying when they talk about how much more productive they are thanks to their spicy corporate autocomplete. The anger that I feel is not some abstract moral high ground, but a visceral reaction to having gone outside in deadly climate conditions to spread an insufficient amount of water on my dying plants.

When they say that AI is the future, this is what that actually means.