In the wake of the Artificial Intelligence paradigm, data centres are set to proliferate all over the country. These server warehouses dedicated to processing and storing computer data generate numerous conflicts over the use of water and electricity. They take up land and cause environmental pollutions. They are monopolising public funds and accelerating the current bio-climatic crisis.
As part of its ‘Ecology and digital technologies’ working group, La Quadrature du Net has been involved for several months in a local fight against these infrastructures in Marseille, led in particular by the ‘Le nuage était sous nos pieds’ collective (“the cloud was beneath our feet”). Today, Monday 16 September, an first press conference is being held to denounce the project for a new data centre by Digital Realty, one of the world’s biggest players in this rapidly expanding market. Here is what the members of the collective had to say.
Reclaiming control over digital infrastructure!
Speech by the collective ‘Le nuage était sous nos pieds’ at the press conference on the public inquiry into MRS5 (new data centre on the former Silo à sucre), Monday 16 September at 11am (114 chemin du littoral, 13015 Marseille).
Hello, I’m speaking on behalf of the Marseilles collective ‘Le nuage était sous nos pieds’ (The cloud was beneath our feet). Formed not long ago, we are made up of at least three entities: La Quadrature du Net, which defends fundamental freedoms in the digital environment; Technopolice, which analyses and fights against surveillance technologies; the collectif des Gammares, a popular education collective on water issues. We have come together, alerted by the near-total neglect for the environmental and territorial issues tied to digital infrastructures in the public debate, even as Marseille sees the arrival of more and more submarine cables for intercontinental Internet links and the emergence of data centres in a resounding political and media silence.
Overheating in the general interest?
In the MRS5 communication brochure discussed here, the new data centre is presented as being in perfect continuity with the historical uses of this location within the port system. Data storage is now taking over food storage, the cattle market and the sugar silo. You might say at first that you can’t eat data, but more seriously, it’s worth pointing out how blurred this marketing vocabulary is in relation to the technical object itself. A data centre is not simply a storage warehouse, it’s a mega-computer made of concrete, housing hundreds of servers that run around the clock. Digital multinationals and other businesses rent space there to benefit from the storage capacity and computing power of this ‘mega-computer. Meanwhile, that mega-computer overheats, sending back hot air or hot water into a city already too often prone to heatwaves. It sucks out astronomical amounts of water and electricity onto the public grid, and generates virtually no direct employment.
Digital landlords and governmental startuppers are used to saying that these data centres are ‘projects of major national interest ’, like the bridges or railway stations of yesteryear. That they are the new infrastructures ‘indispensable to the functioning of French society as a whole’ as suggested in the actual bill to simplify economic life, and that they serve the general interest. Placing data centres in the same category as major public territorial infrastructures allows us to pretend that they are self-evident and respond only to the natural demands tied to the progress of civilisation. If we consider that these infrastructures really serve the general interest, they could be municipalised, and fit in with the real needs of local authorities rather than being entrusted to private multinationals such as Digital Realty.
We believe that it is the very idea that these infrastructures can serve the general interest that needs to be questioned. We believe that the ‘data centre’ object, this mega-computer, is being imposed by a handful of digital multinationals in agreement with governments eager for short-term profits. It’s high time we opened the black box of technical systems and admitted that technical issues are always also political ones. The digital giants proceed without any consultation at local or national level, bypassing collective planning and decision-making systems. We need to give power back to the people so that they can exercise self-determination over digital issues and explore decentralised, community-based alternatives that take care of us, each other and our territory.
Grabbing
Digital is often referred to as the so-called ‘cloud’, a cloud that is in fact nothing vaporous. The ‘cloud’, in fact, is made up of these mega-computers linked around the world by fibre-optic submarine cables, 18 of which are now arriving in Marseille. Now, these mega-computers are taking up all the available land, whether within the GPMM, like MRS 2, 3, 4 and this new candidate, or in the northern neighbourhoods of Saint-André, Saint-Henri and Belle-de-Mai, or outside the city limits, like the Digital Realty project in Bouc Bel Air. There’s even a project for a floating data centre!
These server warehouses are also monopolising the public electricity networks and the energy available, to the point of saturating their capacities. Today we’re speaking directly opposite the electricity substation built specifically by Digital Realty to power its data centres. Their extraordinary capital resources enable them to build their own electricity infrastructure, without ever worrying about the consequences for local residents and their communities. So much so that conflicts of use are piling up. Here in Marseille, we have to choose between electrifying the buses or the quays for the cruise ships, or electrifying these data centres which are hogging the available energy instead of our infrastructure and public services. Will we one day have to choose between powering a data centre or a hospital?
Finally, the digital giants are also hogging our water. The ‘rivercooling’ used in Marseille by Digital Realty to cool its data centres, is nothing more than the diversion of drinking quality water from the old Gardanne mining gallery, for little energy gain. Attributing the use of this water to this industrial need raises the question of future conflicts of use, which the latest summer droughts have given us a glimpse of. On a global scale, the water issue is reaching worrying proportions: In 2021, for example, Google announced that it had used more than 15 billion cubic meters of water to cool its data centres.
Greenwashing
The marketing departments of digital multinationals would like us to believe that data centres are ‘green factories’, that they would have no impact on the environment. According to them, data centres can even be seen as light infrastructures, using water and electricity resources sparingly and in an ‘optimised’ way. This is not true.
The urgent need right now is to embark on a trajectory of energy sobriety. The explosion in energy demand coming from data centers is absolutely not compatible with our more general climate objectives. Because resources are not unlimited. MRS5 will monopolise water and electricity, and require the construction of other green energy production plants that are already controversial. Even if it sometimes seems hackneyed, we must once again remember the adage that ‘the only green energy is the energy we don’t produce’.
Even more so since calculations of environmental efficiency often have the unfortunate tendency to obliterate and externalise part of their impact: How far do we calculate the energy and human costs of a data centre? Should we look at the extremely water-hungry microchips, the obsolescence of submarine cables, and other digital waste that the United Nations estimates at 10.5 million tonnes?
Can we continue to make invisible the extremely violent extranational mining extraction sectors, in the Democratic Republic of Congo in particular and in the rest of the world. David Maenda Kithoko, president of the association Génération Lumière, an association of Congolese refugees, makes this point loud and clear: the digital revolution is spilling the blood of his people. MRS5 is built on the Saint-Louis sugar silo, a building emblematic of French imperialism and colonial trade. What if we could find another use for this old building, one that would not re-enact this violence, but that would genuinely be part of a trajectory of sobriety and social justice?
Taking back control
Finally, the central question here is: What – for whom – are these data centres used for? The vast majority of data flows circulating in data centres are meant for businesses. We are led to believe that these mega-computers are simply a response to a crying need on the part of free consumers. But if we look at the list of future MRS5 corporate customers, we see : KP1, a specialist in prefabricated concrete – concrete is responsible for 8% of greenhouse gas emissions; Flowbird, a company involved in the ‘intelligent city’; MisterFly, an online travel agency for booking flights, and so on. Apart from an archaeological research department, MRS5’s first known customers do not necessarily seem to be of “national public interest”. On the contrary, they are players from the same technocratic world as the data centres themselves.
Like MRS5, thousands of new data centres will soon be built to better support the programmed rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), adding to all the IT infrastructures that already exist. However, we could legitimately ask ourselves whether there isn’t already too much digital technology in our lives, not only from an environmental point of view but also in terms of its impact on society. At a time when more and more health professionals are warning us about the impact of screens on mental health, Netflix’s boss has pointed sleep as his main competitor. The boom in AI, which is entirely trained and served in and by these data centres, heralds many new forms of violence that we will have to face: deep fakes, harassment, discriminatory decision-making algorithms. This is indeed one of the challenges facing the digital giants: To take up more of our time and attention by storm, at the expense of our health if needs be.
The intrusion of digital technology into most professional fields very often comes up against resistance. Whether in medicine, agriculture, education, the post office or government departments, the logic underlying this development is almost always the same: optimisation and technical dispossession leading to a loss of professional meaning, isolation, intensification of work rates and industrialisation. The professional crisis affecting these sectors is much more a crisis of human resources than of technical efficiency.
We can and must regain control, and that means challenging new infrastructure construction projects such as Digital Realty’s MRS5 in the port of Marseille.
The public enquiry into the MRS5 project is open until 27 September 2024.
This text was read out in the presence of local elected representatives and NFP MPs, the federation of neighbourhood interest committees (CIQ) in the 16th arrondissement of Marseille, France Nature Environnement 13 (FNE13) and the Cap au Nord association.
Are you also involved in a local fight against data centres? Write to us at : lenuageetaitsousnospieds@riseup.net