“We walk for the water we need,” Juan, a middle-aged man born in the Indigenous rural community of Maconí, Mexico, explained. “If we don’t walk, who will give it to us? It’s a four-hour journey each day to fetch water … Since last year, there hasn’t been rain, and this year it’s the same.” The bean crop had withered and there was no corn to make tortillas, he told Ana Valdivia, a lecturer in AI at the Oxford Internet Institute. Valdivia had met Juan during a protest organized by his community in front of the city hall of Querétaro, the capital of a state lying to the north of Mexico City. The community was demanding the fundamental right to access water. With Mexico parched and Mexico city sinking and running dry, Querétaro was in an even more precarious situation. It was the only Mexican state whose entirety had a high-risk drought rating. Despite all this, Querétaro had plans to be a water-guzzling data center hub for Big Tech. “The geographical placement of Mexico is strategical for the data centre industry because it connects Canada and the US, with Central and South America through submarine cables,” Valdivia explained.

As Big Tech sucked up all the available electricity and water in its home countries, it greedily eyed the water and electricity of poorer countries. It was already doing this with the materials needed to manufacture its computer servers, with the metals sourced in the Global South, its products assembled in Global South sweatshops, and then later these same products dumped back as toxic e-waste in the Global South. Why not do the same with data? Why not store the data of rich people in poor places so that the water and electricity of poor people would get used, instead of the water and electricity of rich people?

“It’s turned into extractivism,” said Tania Rodríguez, a member of the Chilean Socio Environmental Community Movement for Land and Water, who were protesting the explosion in data center building in their country. “We end up being everybody’s backyard.” Exactly that. Water and electricity is expensive to transport over long distances. Data is light. Let the data suck up the water and electricity in a poor neighborhood in the Global South and then get used by some bored middle class rich kids in the Global North.

It’s not simply the poorest countries. It’s also poor parts of rich countries. When the Institute for Local Self-Reliance did a study of AI and data center expansion in the USA, it found that nine out of the top 10 counties most affected were low-income communities, with predominantly Black populations.

Ireland likes to jump from one colonial master to another. First, we jumped out of the British Empire and jumped into the Roman Catholic Empire. Then, we jumped from there into the Big Tech Empire. Ireland has long sold its environment for a few dollars more. Do you think that the gigantic quantities of data that were consuming over 20% of Irish electricity by the mid-2020s was all Irish data for Irish people? You’d be lucky if 1% of it was. Big Tech was doing the same too in the poorer, drought-stricken regions of Spain, and anywhere else they could get their tax breaks and cheap water and electricity, and where they thought they could bully and intimidate the local community.

The data from a colonizing country colonizes the land, water and energy of a poor country. It is stored there in a physical building that can be the size of multiple football fields. It is fed and processed using cheap local electricity. It is kept cool using cheap local water. Though this data uses these colonized local resources, that data itself is used in the colonizing country by the citizens of the colonizer. Of course, 90% of this data is not even used. It is data waste, and like e-waste, it is stored far away from the source that made it. This is all possible because of the nature of the distributed network that is the Internet.

At a larger level, all our data is colonized by Big Tech. Every day we are online we help rear a data doppelganger. It’s a version of us made of data. That data is ours but does not belong to us. Because of our addiction to ‘free’ services, we have signed away our data rights to Big Tech. Big Tech owns us because it owns our digital doppelganger and is mining us for our data wealth. Mining us and controlling us. Big Tech has colonized our raw data, processed and organized it and then sells it on for a hefty profit to advertisers and propagandists. We have been data colonized and we don’t even know it.