The story started in Georgia, US—not with a law being broken in some faraway place, but with residents noticing something wrong in their own homes: the water pressure kept dropping unusually. County officials repeatedly told residents to cut back on water usage. The reason? A data centre owned by Blackstone, the private equity giant, had quietly consumed 30 million gallons of water amidst drought without authorisation. While ordinary citizens were told to conserve, a corporation was drinking the aquifer dry to cool off its servers.
While communities are resisting such extraction models of digital infrastructures across the US, Europe and the broader West, and scrutiny tightens at home, the industry has conveniently pivoted and found new phenomenal ground to extract from new populations to absorb the cost, new territories where regulation is thin, and protest is easier to ignore. That ground is the Global South, and the hands doing the extracting belong to the same powers that have been here and ruled before.
According to the special report “Dark Side of the Boom” by Earth Journalism Network (EJN), countries like India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand are racing to become digital hubs, often without adequate environmental safeguards or public transparency about the trade-offs involved. As recently as this year, the Economic Times reported that, amidst dire concerns of environmentalists that India’s rapidly growing AI and cloud computing sectors could consume nearly 37.5 billion litres of water annually and the imminent threat of groundwater depletion by 2050, India AI Impact Summit 2026 secured over $250 billion in investment commitments for AI infrastructure, including data centres and semiconductor facilities. As data centre investments surge across South and Southeast Asia, Bangladesh too is witnessing the same thrust. According to a report by The Climate Watch (2025), it is estimated that Bangladesh already has a latent data centre requirement of around 200 MW, projected to grow to over 500 MW by 2030. The report further elaborates that the US-based Osiris Group is investing $200 million in a single Tier-IV facility here. A $290 million wave of investment is washing over a country where over 40 percent of the population lacks access to safe drinking water, and only two percent of power comes from clean energy sources.
In 2023, groundwater levels across Bangladesh’s urban zones dropped to their lowest in three decades. Studies by the Institute of Water Modelling show water tables in Dhaka falling by more than three metres per year in some locations. Every new borehole deepens the problem. “We used to get water at 150 feet. Now the pump doesn’t work even at 300 feet. And we are told the new data centres will use thousands of litres every minute,” said Harun Mia, a 45-year-old farmer from Mirzapur, who cultivates in farmlands near Kaliakoir Hi-Tech Park.
Similar crises have been reported in India, where farmers are drilling up to 1,000 feet, often hitting dry, hard bedrock or drawing up unusable saline water. The irony is that the Bangladesh Water Act, 2013, places drinking water, hygiene, and sanitation as the highest priority for both groundwater and surface water ahead of all other uses. Industrial extraction ranks seventh. Yet, the government keeps issuing permits that violate this hierarchy, while Dhaka WASA, burdened with $1.66 billion in foreign loans, supplies data centres at subsidised rates as residential consumers face rationing.
To this, Dr Ahmad Kamruzzaman Majumder, professor of environmental science at Stamford University Bangladesh, said, “The developed world is shifting energy-intensive data centres to the Global South, where the strain and carbon footprint fall on us. Big giants like Google and Amazon set up their data centres here.” If we continue fuelling data centres with fossil energy and groundwater, he warned, “we’re digitising disaster.”
While billions flow into data centre investments, as per another report by the Climate Watch (2026), a water pump for a hillside village, apparently, could not be made to stand. In Bandarbans, a donor-funded solar water project built in the remote Empupara area of Tangkabati Union under Lama upazila has fallen into disrepair within months of its inauguration amid allegations of corruption, poor construction, and weak oversight. Residents also alleged that the solar panels were not mounted with adequate structural support or stability, while the site, on a vulnerable edge of a hill, exposed the installation to erosion and wind damage. Dozens of indigenous families now travel long distances to collect water from natural sources, a hardship that was promised to end. When a country can mobilise $290 million for digital infrastructure but cannot keep a solar panel upright, the word for that is not development. It is deflection, dressed in the language of progress, pointed away from the people who need it most.
What is happening in Bangladesh, India and across the Global South with data centres is not new in logic. The Western fashion industry’s dependence on Global South labour was never simply about market efficiency. It is a structural continuation of colonial extraction, reproduced through trade architecture and regulatory arbitrage. The human and ecological costs of consumption are exported onto populations with the least political power to resist them.
To put it simply, data centres are the new garment factories—same actors, same logic, same geography and the same colonial extractive modus operandi. They arrive with the language of development and investment. They leave with the energy, water and carbon budget of communities that had none to spare. This is neither globalisation nor mutual development. It is colonialism with updated accounting, and we should see and name it as such.
We have been conditioned to see a billion-dollar investment announcement and feel pride rather than ask who it will benefit. The pattern is not buried in classified documents. It has been mapped by journalists, measured by environmental scientists, and lived by the communities bearing the weight.
Naming the pattern is the first act of resistance, while demanding governments enforce their own laws and amplify and provide strong support to the networks and coalitions who are already working on it is the next. Above all, let’s stop pretending that digital infrastructure is something that happens in a cloud—weightless, invisible and unaccountable.
S Arzooman Chowdhury is researcher and practitioner of gender justice and human rights.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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