“The ships at first sailed down the Nile carrying guns not bread, and the railways were originally set up to transport troops; the schools were started so as to teach us how to say ‘Yes’ in their language.” – Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1966)

When Winston Churchill laid eyes upon the Nile River during his 1907 visit to Uganda, he was transfixed for hours. It was a mighty river, brimming with potential. So much power, going to waste. He imagined, “what fun to make the immemorial Nile begin its journey by driving through a turbine!”

Colonial attitudes of conquering the natural world for the acceleration of industry persists in the present day. The harmful impacts of colonisation on the planet and Indigenous peoples persist, and the tech industry contributes to this immensely. In her book Empire of AI (2025), Karen Hao argues that modern tech companies are behaving like European colonisers,leveraging their technology and wealth against poor countries to extract their natural resources. For example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, slave labour is used to mine minerals for batteries. Even the ocean floor is layered with giant cables to connect the World Wide Web. But Monopolistic enterprises are not just concerned with selling their product. They also want to impose their culture and values on other countries to establish themselves as the true north of the industry and dictate the distribution of resources like water.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the British built the Aswan Low Dam in Egypt to stop the flow of the Nile, redirecting water for cotton and other cash crops. Seizing control of Africa’s rivers was an essential element of European colonisation enabling the transportation of ships, irrigation of crops, electricity generation and fishing.

When hydroelectric dams were first being built across the African continent, the technology to transmit electricity across great distances did not yet exist. Colonial administrators and British power companies were therefore highly selective about their placement for maximum efficiency. In their view, Africans were not consumers of electricity. Therefore, the only sites where they perceived a demand for that much energy were the mining towns inhabited by European settlers.

So, who benefits from these power stations today? Daniel Pena is a researcher from Uruguay who fought back against Google’s attempt to usurp Montevideo’s limited water supply. In a Guardian article in 2024 Pena said that, “[multinational tech companies] come to the Global South to use cheap water, tax-free land, and poorly paid jobs. And then they don’t contribute to our country; they don’t improve our internet access.”

The stunning amount of water consumed by AI agents has made headlines for the last few years. A frequently quoted statistic is that for every five to fifty prompts you give an AI chatbot, roughly one bottle of water is used. Generating just one AI image consumes enough energy to charge a smartphone by as much as 50%. These facts are helpful for conceptualising the environmental harm of AI usage. However, scaling energy and water use down to a singular interaction undersells the massive development of infrastructure, consumption of energy, and drain on natural resources necessary for AI agents to function. For instance, Google has purchased mini nuclear reactors to generate energy specifically for their AI data centres. Both the data centres and nuclear plants require water for cooling.

These data centres used to be small enough to run discretely in cities but companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have turned them into industrial-sized ‘campuses’ that can only fit in rural areas. These companies are now building ‘mega-campuses’ — data centres that would use 1,000–2,000 megawatts of power which is the equivalent of San Francisco’s annual energy use 1.5–3.5 times over. Google, Amazon and Microsoft build their campuses in threes. One data centre is in active use and then there are two back-ups, although all three operate 24/7. The water that data centres use has to be clean to prevent pipe clogs and bacterial growth which means they source portable water from local municipalities. In fact, in 2023, 78% of the water used for Google’s data centres was portable. In many centres, the used water is not recycled but released back into waterways.

Colonial practices are not relics of the past. Practically every day, a different website or app tries to push their new AI tool on us, promising to improve our lives, but that seems hardly the case. It is all in service to these tech empires’ quests for domination, endless expansion and profits.

Designed by Portia Love

Water and Power

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