An immediate threat to lives and livelihoods can be a catalyst for change. A YouGov poll in late June found a majority of British people linked the exceptionally hot weather this summer to climate change. So far, so unsurprising.

But the same polling also showed that attitudes to climate change have hardly budged, despite the heatwaves. The share of the population that is worried about climate change, around two-thirds, has remained constant since September 2021.

What does it take to induce a dramatic shift in attitudes? The answer to that question appears to be: data centres.

This is most obvious in the US, where a statewide moratorium was announced in New York, followed by a pause in Texas, pending an audit that will cover power use, water use, and impacts on local communities. But there’s a growing pushback in Britain too, from Fife to Brick Lane.

The opposition combines concerns about emissions, lack of local benefit and sheer size. A proposed data centre at Auchtertool, a village near Kirkcaldy in Scotland, would cover an area the size of 100 football pitches. The hyperscale data centres currently going through the planning system would require “colossal” amounts of electricity, according to the campaign group Foxglove. Water UK, the water industry’s trade body, says data centres currently use around 6.6m litres of water a day, but by the end of this decade the government’s ambition to triple data centre capacity means this figure could rise to around 20m litres a day. That’s quite a thirst.

The figures for energy and water use are large. Particularly as much of it locks in fossil fuel use. The US tripled plans for gas-fired power capacity last year, with more than a third of this dedicated to on-site power for data centres. In fact, the provision of power has become one of the biggest constraints on data centre growth, with lead times for gas turbine delivery now stretching to three years or more. 

There are alternatives: the Hamina data centre in Finland is cooled by seawater and powered by a grid fed by the country’s biggest wind farm. But the growth in power supply from all sources, clean and dirty, just can’t keep pace with the breakneck quest to build super-intelligent machines.

Put the energy and water use figures in context, though, and they look a little more modest. An average daily demand of 20m litres of water is the equivalent of supplying 60,000 homes. Data centre power demand is forecast to grow, globally, by around 15% a year between now and the end of the decade, according to the International Energy Agency, but the IEA projects that data centres will still only account for 3% of global power demand by 2030.

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AI might also be able to help humanity deal with some of the outcomes of a heating planet. In a paper published in Nature last month, researchers at DeepMind said an AI weather model produced an average of a day or more of lead time advantage for predicting tropical cyclones compared with leading current methods, which rely on costly and time-consuming physics-based modelling. That’s a potentially life-saving shortcut.

The speed and scale of the revolt against data centres reminds me of the public revulsion for plastics, which swelled about a decade ago and won cross-party support in unexpected places including the US Congress, which passed a ban on microbeads in cosmetics with none of the factional division that attends efforts to deal with climate change. 

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Emissions are, admittedly, a more complex and frequently less tangible challenge. Getting Asia off coal would make a huge difference to global emissions, but shutting down coal-fired power stations in Indonesia is both expensive and (if you’re in Europe) remote.

There’s a bigger question here for supporters of data centres to resolve. The opposition may be taking on the hue of anti-system politics. When Donald Trump posts that communities opposed to data centres “want to end up being backwards and poor”, the obvious retort is to ask who they are providing jobs and money for.

Photograph by Supattra Plongklum/Thai News Pix via Getty Images

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