'The cloud is our problem because we are part of the cloud'

Aurora Gomez remembers when her family lost their rural land in central Spain to an airport back in 2008. The Ciudad Real government made lofty promises of economic benefits for communities long beset by high unemployment, only for the airport to be sold in a bankruptcy auction in 2015.   Today, Gomez says the government is using the same strategy of sacrificing rural communities and ways of life to make room for massive tech infrastructure projects.

‘Every day there is a new headline that there is a new data centre that is going to be built in Spain ... All of them are hyperscale. This is a problem,’ she said on a recent episode of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us.

On 6 October, Meta confirmed its plans to build an enormous data centre to house computing and networking equipment in Spain’s northeastern Aragon region. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Blackstone are also pumping billions into these projects that they have promised will create thousands of jobs and transform Aragon’s farming communities into one of Europe’s biggest cloud services hubs.

But Gomez is pushing back on this narrative through her environmental collective, Tu Nube Seca Mi Rio (Your Cloud Dries My River).

Data centres are largely automated, she says, so they don’t actually employ many people. An Amazon centre that opened in Aragon in 2022 has just 60 employees. She also points out their immense water and electricity consumption defy conservation efforts as Spain experiences a historic drought. In Ireland — already a major European cloud hub — data centres use a fifth of the country’s electricity.

For the past year, Gomez has fought what she calls a misinformation campaign from tech companies who are garnering local support for their centres via unsubstantiated talk of prosperity and development in rural communities. She suspects the companies are building in rural zones where industry is largely welcomed and where those who criticize industry, like her family did back in 2008, are treated as traitors.

‘The lack of water is the main problem for any citizen right now in Spain,’ she says, adding that part of her campaign’s success derives from raising awareness of the negative ecological impacts of data centres, particularly in rural communities.

‘We have to deconstruct this idea of the cloud, that the cloud is not material. The cloud is really physical. The cloud is also our problem, because we are part of the cloud.’

— Cole Sinanian (colesinanian.com)