Using a slew of aliases to buy land and make sweet deals, getting secret, historic tax breaks, getting electricity at less than half of what ordinary people pay, being sold public land for less than half the market value, slurping down the cheapest of cheap water like there’s no tomorrow, this is how Big Tech rolls. “Google faced criticism for its plans to build a massive data center in Mesa, Arizona, after it was revealed that the company would pay a lower water rate than most residents,” Eric Olson, Anne Grau and Taylor Tipton reported for the University of Tulsa. “The deal, negotiated with the city, allowed Google to pay $6.08 per 1,000 gallons of water, while residents paid $10.80 per 1,000 gallons.”

In Uruguay, the people thought their fresh water was so plentiful they wrote it into their constitution as a basic citizen right. Along came climate change. In 2022, “Montevideo was the first capital in the world to arrive at ‘day zero’ and run out of potable water,” environmentalist Eduardo Gudynas told Mongabay. The citizens were forced to drink salty water from the Rio de la Plata river. Meanwhile, Google had plans for Uruguay’s fresh water and, as usual, it wasn’t telling anyone. Citizens had to go to court to force Google to disclose that its cooling towers would need 7.6 million liters (2.0 million gallons) of fresh water a day. “No es sequia, es saqueo!”—“It’s not drought, it’s pillage,” the citizens said. While over in Chile, they were asking, “With Google as my neighbor, will there still be water?”

When it comes down to a choice between a poor person drinking and the data drinking, it’s clear that the data comes first. “When Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Irma devastated Puerto Rico, the data centers on the island did not go hungry for power or thirsty for water,” researcher Steven Gonzalez, whose family are from the country, told me. The data drank its fill, even as the citizens went without access to fresh water for months. In Nigeria, they had to “buy water to cook,” Felix Adebayo, resident of Lagos, told Abdallah Taha and Alfred Olufemi. Meanwhile, close by, at least ten data centers drank their fill.

We are only at the beginning of the Big Tech war for water and other resources. It’s going to get much worse. The Big Tech Nazis are waving their arms and telling us who they truly are. We should believe them. The Big Tech Nazis would think nothing of wiping out half the planet once it helped them build their rocket to Mars, or whatever technology they’re building that will help them consolidate power.

There is a global water crisis. Lands are desertifying at frightening rates as soils collapse dues to the stresses of overconsumption driven by Big Tech. We have pumped so much groundwater in the last 50 years, we have altered the earth’s tilt. And now along comes ravenous AI, its thirst doubling and doubling again. Until recently, most data centers have been getting water so cheap they haven’t even bothered managing it. Only constant public pressure can have any chance of reining in the excesses of Big Tech.