You open your laptop, launch Google Chrome, and type in gmail.com. Within a second or two, your screen open up to your inbox, that overflowing mess of promotional emails, forgotten newsletters, and a barrage of emails you should have deleted long ago. You do not think twice about this. It just is.
Pause for a moment and ask yourself. Where was all of that sitting before you opened up your email? Your emails were not hiding inside your laptop. They were not floating in air. They were sitting on a computer, not yours, but someone else’s; in a building, you have never seen, possibly thousands of kilometres away. A building, filled with row upon rows of powerful computers humming away around the clock, these are data centres.
Think of it this way. When you post a photo on Instagram, it does not just stay on your phone. It is copied to a data centre so that your friend in Delhi or your cousin in Dubai can see it on their phone too. When you stream a film on Netflix on a Friday night, that film is not beamed from a studio in Hollywood directly to your television. It is stored in a data centre and delivered to you through the internet. When you ask Google a question , “best biryani near me”, Google’s computers in a data centre somewhere race to find the answer and send it back to your screen in less than a second. Every time you send a WhatsApp message, make a UPI payment, book a cab on Uber, or even ask ChatGPT to help you draft an email, a data centre somewhere in the world is doing the heavy lifting.
Now, while billionaires (apologies, trillionaires) like Elon Musk are busy trying to beam the internet down from satellites, the vast majority of the world’s internet still travels through undersea cables made of optical fibre, thin glass threads that carry pulses of light across ocean floors from continent to continent. These cables connect to data centres on land. And it is inside those data centres that the internet, in a very physical sense, actually lives.
A data centre is, at its simplest, a very large, very expensive warehouse full of computers. But unlike the laptop on your desk, these computers never shut down. They run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. And because they are working so hard, they produce an enormous amount of heat, like thousands of kitchen ovens running simultaneously in a sealed room. If that heat is not removed, the computers melt. Literally. So data centres need massive cooling systems: giant fans, industrial air conditioners, and increasingly, systems that circulate chilled water or specialised liquids directly over the machines. All of this, the computing and the cooling, requires a staggering amount of electricity. A single large data centre can consume as much power as a small city. Some of the newer ones, built for artificial intelligence, need as much electricity as eighty thousand to eight hundred thousand homes.
And that is before we talk about water. Many cooling systems work by evaporating water, the same principle that makes you feel cool when you step out of a swimming pool on a windy day. A large data centre can gulp down up to five million gallons of water in a single day , roughly the amount an entire town of fifty thousand people would use.
The Boom
For decades, data centres existed without the current levels of scrutiny. They were modest buildings tucked away in industrial parks, and nobody paid much attention to them. But in the last three or four years, something changed dramatically. The explosion of artificial intelligence, tools like ChatGPT, image generators, self-driving car software, sent demand for computing power through the roof. Training a single AI model can require thousands of specialised chips running for months, consuming electricity equivalent to what several thousand homes use in a year. And once trained, these AI systems need even more data centres to actually serve millions of users asking questions, generating images, and running code every second of the day.
The result has been a construction frenzy unlike anything the technology industry has ever seen. In 2025, the fourteen largest data centre companies spent close to seven hundred and fifty billion dollars building new facilities. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta alone spent over four hundred billion dollars, nearly double, what they spent the year before. For the first time in American history, spending on data centre construction surpassed spending on office buildings. By the end of 2025, more than twenty-three gigawatts of data centre capacity was under construction worldwide across over eight hundred sites. The International Energy Agency projects that global electricity consumption by data centres will roughly double by 2030, reaching levels comparable to the entire electricity consumption of Japan.
The counter-current in America
Naturally, a movement of this much capital will have repercussions. Across the United States, ordinary citizens, farmers, retirees, schoolteachers, small-town mayors, have started fighting back against this expansion with remarkable success.
The reason is simple. A data centre may power the global internet, but the costs are borne locally. When a giant facility moves into a rural county, it strains the local power grid. Electricity bills go up for everyone. Noise from the industrial cooling fans is relentless, a constant low hum that residents describe as maddening. Millions of litres of water is diverted from farms and homes. Fertile agricultural land gets paved over. In addition, the number of permanent jobs these highly automated facilities create? Often just a few hundred.
A 2026 Gallup poll found that seventy per cent of Americans now oppose having a data centre built near their neighbourhood. This is not a left-versus-right issue. Both Republicans worried about corporate tax breaks and Democrats concerned about the environment have found common ground. Over a hundred and forty activist groups across two dozen states have organised against data centre projects. In the last two years alone, roughly sixty-four billion dollars’ worth of projects have been either blocked outright or significantly delayed.
The stories are vivid. In Cascade Locks, Oregon, residents were so angry about a proposed hundred-million-dollar data centre that they organised a recall election, voted out the officials who had approved it, and the new board promptly cancelled the project. In Warrenton, Virginia, over five hundred residents packed a town council meeting, a hundred and thirty of them stood up to speak against an Amazon data centre, and in the next election, every single council member who had supported the project lost their seat. In a small town in Missouri called Peculiar, a grassroots group calling itself “Don’t Dump Data in Peculiar” fought a billion-and-a-half-dollar project so effectively that the town’s planning commission rewrote the zoning code to ban data centres entirely.
The Search for New Ground
Faced with this wall of resistance, the tech giants have started looking elsewhere. If Americans do not want these facilities in their backyards, the companies will build them in countries where governments are more welcoming, land is cheaper, and opposition is less organised.
India has become a prime destination. The Indian government has rolled out an extraordinary welcome mat: it granted data centres formal “infrastructure status” to make financing easier, offered cheap land, reduced electricity tariffs, and in its February 2026 budget, announced a twenty-year tax holiday for foreign companies building data centres. Under this framework, income of such foreign cloud service providers from global cloud operations routed through India-based data centres will not be subject to Indian taxation, subject to specified conditions. Additionally, services to Indian customers must be delivered through an Indian reseller entity, ensuring that domestic transactions remain within the tax net.
India also has what the industry needs i.e., a massive domestic market of over nine hundred and forty million internet users, the world’s highest per-capita mobile data consumption, and a financial system(think of the tens of billions in UPI transactions processed every single month) that desperately needs local computing infrastructure to keep running securely.
The Gulf States, particularly the UAE, have made a similar pitch, offering land, cheap energy, and streamlined approvals.
Why your Data Forces these Centres onto Indian Soil
There is another, less visible reason why data centres are being built inside India at this pace, and it has nothing to do with cheap land or tax breaks. It has to do with the law, specifically, laws that govern where your personal data is allowed to physically exist.
Think about what happens when you make a payment using Google Pay or PhonePe. Your transaction details your bank account number, the amount, the merchant, the time, are all pieces of personal data. Now, the question is, where is that data stored? Is it sitting on a server in Virginia? In Singapore? Or in India? The answer matters, because governments want to make sure they can access, audit, and protect the financial data of their citizens. If your transaction records are stored on a server in a foreign country, an Indian regulator cannot simply walk in and inspect them.
This is the logic behind data localisation, the idea that certain categories of data must be stored on servers physically located within the country’s borders. And India has been tightening these rules steadily.
The most sweeping example is the Reserve Bank of India’s 2018 directive. The RBI issued an unambiguous order that said all entities operating in India’s payment ecosystem, banks, payment gateways, wallets, third-party processors, must store the complete data of every domestic transaction exclusively on systems located within India. This covers everything like transaction details, customer data, payment credentials like OTPs and PINs, and settlement instructions. This single directive forced global payment giants like Visa and MasterCard to scramble for server space inside the country. Specialised cloud providers reported that up to seventy per cent of their communication volume now runs through strictly Indian data centres to comply with the RBI’s rules.
The securities regulator, SEBI, followed suit. In August 2024, through its Cybersecurity and Cyber Resilience Framework, SEBI mandated that all data relating to Indian securities markets, trade records, client KYC documents, fund flows, margin records, must be hosted exclusively within India. The order was so sweeping that the industry pushed back hard over the costs of migrating data from offshore servers. SEBI placed the strictest parts of the mandate in temporary abeyance in December 2024, but the rule has not been repealed. Companies are actively preparing for the day it is enforced, building flexible systems that can rapidly move workloads back to Indian soil.
Overarching all of this is India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act of 2023. Earlier drafts of this law proposed a strict blanket rule that all Indian user data must stay in India. The final version adopted a more flexible approach. Under Section 16 of the Act, cross-border data transfers are permitted by default, but the central government retains the power to blacklist specific countries at any time, instantly cutting off data flows to those jurisdictions. This creates a powerful incentive for global technology companies. Even though the law does not currently require blanket localisation, the threat of future restrictions hangs permanently in the air. Any company that has invested billions in serving Indian users knows that the government could, with a single notification, force them to store all Indian data domestically. Building data centres inside India is, in effect, an insurance policy against that risk.
The combined effect of these regulations, the RBI’s hard mandate for payments data, SEBI’s framework for securities data, and the DPDP Act’s latent power to restrict cross-border flows, has created an enormous, legally driven demand for data centre capacity within India’s borders. It is not just that companies want to be in India for its market. In many cases, it is also because they are legally required to be here. The scale of the data centre could however be a choice of the company. Essentially, the discussion over the data centres would then become whether we need massive data centres like the proposed Google AI Data centre in Visakhapatnam.
The Data Centre in Vizag
In October 2025, Google announced plans to build a massive data centre campus in Vizag, a one-gigawatt facility, among the largest anywhere in the world outside of Untied States, backed by an estimated ten to fifteen billion dollars in investment. The project, developed in partnership with AdaniConneX and Airtel’s Nxtra, would include three subsea cable landings connecting Vizag directly to global internet networks stretching to Singapore, Australia, the Middle East, and the United States. The Andhra Pradesh government allotted roughly 600 acres of land across three locations: Tarluvada, Adavivaram, and Rambilli. Construction officially broke ground on April 28, 2026. State leaders hailed the project as transformative, a chance to position Vizag as a major global technology hub.
But on the ground, the story looks very different.
About two hundred acres at Tarluvada belong to Dalit families. These are parcels of land that were allotted to landless families in the 1970s under land reform programmes, small plots, about two acres each, meant to give the poorest communities a foothold of economic security. Under the Andhra Pradesh Assigned Lands (Prohibition of Transfers) Act of 1977, these lands cannot legally be sold, gifted, leased, or transferred to anyone. They were meant to stay with marginalised families forever. Farmers allege that parcels held by dominant castes are being left untouched, while Dalit-owned land is specifically targeted.
The promises of prosperity have come under sharp scrutiny. The skills required to run a hyper scale data centre, thermal engineering, cybersecurity, network architecture, are worlds apart from the agricultural livelihoods of the communities being displaced.
The Water Question
But the concern that cuts deepest in Vizag is water.
To understand why, we need to step back and look at the larger picture. In 2018, NITI Aayog, the Indian government’s own policy think tank, published a report that should have shaken the country. It warned that twenty-one major Indian cities, including Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad, were on track to run out of groundwater by 2030. Six hundred million Indians, the report said, already face “high to extreme” water stress. India holds eighteen per cent of the world’s population but has access to just four per cent of its freshwater. Per capita water availability has fallen to around eleven hundred cubic metres, below the international water stress threshold of seventeen hundred, and dangerously close to the scarcity line of a thousand.
Visakhapatnam is not exempt from this crisis. It is already a water-stressed city. Groundwater monitoring data shows that any parts of the district have seen 20 metres drop in ground water levels from 2025-26. Scanty rainfall, rapid urbanisation, and industrial expansion have drained the city’s aquifers faster than they can recharge. Women queuing at public taps and water tankers is a recurring sight every summer.
It is into this reality that a one-gigawatt data centre is being built. Data centres are extraordinarily thirsty. Google itself disclosed that its data centres worldwide-consumed roughly thirty-one billion litres of water in 2024 alone. Industry analysts estimate that eighty to ninety per cent of the water used by data centres comes from potable sources, lakes, rivers, and aquifers, often the same sources that supply drinking water to local communities. This is not theoretical harm. In Joliet, Illinois, an aquifer that historically supplied the city’s drinking water has been so depleted, partly due to data centre construction in the surrounding Chicago region, that expert’s project it will be entirely gone by 2030. Loudoun County in Virginia, home to the world’s densest cluster of data centres, supplied over a billion gallons of potable water to those facilities in a single year.
Has a direct, proven causal link between a data centre and groundwater collapse been formally established in India? Not yet. The Vizag facility has only just broken ground. But the physics are not in doubt. A June 2026 report by the United Nations University warned that by 2030, the water footprint of global data centres would equal the basic annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa. The question is not whether data centres consume enormous quantities of water. The question is what happens when you plant one of the largest such facilities on earth in a city that is already struggling to give its residents enough water to drink.
The Human Rights Forum has pointed out that part of the Vizag project sits barely a hundred and twenty metres from the Mudasarlova reservoir, one of the city’s crucial drinking water sources. Environmental groups allege that hill-cutting, forest clearance, and construction activity near the reservoir’s catchment area have already begun altering the natural water flows that feed it, and that all of this proceeded before environmental clearances were properly completed. On June 10, 2026, the state environment authority granted clearance to the Adavivaram site, but the HRF condemned the decision as a “brazen injustice,” noting that the clearance document was conspicuously silent on the project’s implications for drainage patterns, groundwater recharge, and the long-term water security of the city.
Conclusion
The uprooting of communities in Vizag, the silence on water, the rushed clearances, these are not failures of one project but symptoms of a model in which technology investment arrives in India as a kind of coronation, where the politician who secures the deal is anointed a visionary and the sheer scale of the numbers announced creates a gravity so strong that democratic friction , the town hall, the impact assessment, the voice of the farmer whose land is being taken, gets crushed before it can form.
Perhaps the most troubling part is not that India is building data centres, it must, given its data localisation mandates and nine hundred and forty million internet users, but that it appears to be building them without demanding what other nations have already begun to insist upon.
Singapore imposed a three-year moratorium on new data centres, lifted it only under the strictest green energy and efficiency standards in the Asia-Pacific, and now approves capacity solely on sustainability merit. Stockholm integrated its data centres into the city’s heating grid, turning waste heat into warmth for thirty thousand apartments; Microsoft has moved to zero-water cooling designs; waterless chip-level cooling systems that halve energy consumption are commercially deployed today. None of this is speculative. The technologies and the governance frameworks exist.
What does not yet exist in India is the institutional feedback loop that would allow a resident of Tarluvada or a woman queuing at a water tanker in Vizag to say, credibly and consequentially that “we are not against progress, but we need to know where our water will come from, whether our land can lawfully be taken, and what, specifically, we stand to gain” and to have that question shape the project rather than be swept aside by it.
Until that loop is built, India risks winning the data centre and losing the aquifer, gaining the investment headline and hollowing out the communities it was supposed to serve, and discovering, perhaps too late, that for a country of one and a half billion people living on four per cent of the world’s freshwater, the cost of unaccountable development is not abstract but existential.
(The author is part of the legal research team of the organisation)
Related:
Himalayan Courts: Young folds & new cracks in environmental jurisprudence
Environmental Jurisprudence: The Bombay High Court’s shifting language
Cracks in Indian Environment Jurisprudence: An examination of High Courts of central India