New Web Hosting Pioneer Emerges, Offering Affordable Hosting Solutions Coupled with…AI use is surging astronomically around the globe, requiring vastly more energy to make AI-friendly semiconductor chips and causing a gigantic explosion in data center construction. So large and rapid is this expansion that Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, has warned that AI is driving humanity toward a “catastrophic energy crisis.
“We walk for the water we need. If we don’t walk, who will give it to us?” asks Juan, a middle-aged man born in the Indigenous rural community of Maconí, Mexico. “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 has withered and there’s no corn to make tortillas, he told Ana Valdivia, an AI expert from the U.K.’s Oxford Internet Institute.
“Querétaro is already hosting 10 functioning data centers, and planning to install 18 more, some of them to support the growing demand of ChatGPT,” says Valdivia. “Data centers are extracting drinking water for their economic businesses, whereas Juan has to walk almost a day to water his beans and nixtamal .” Mexico is ideally situated for the mushrooming data industry, explains Valdivia, due to its location between North America and Central and South America via undersea cables.
A protest in Querétaro, Mexico in September 2022. One demonstrator bears a sign reading “It’s not a drought but plunder.” Querétaro is the only state in Mexico where all the territory faces water shortages, yet it has been selected as Latin America’s largest hub for data centers. Image courtesy of Global Voices.AI demand is growing at lighting speed, with ChatGPT gaining 1 million users within the first five days of its release in November 2023.
Moreover, Big Tech firms like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Google are confident that the gargantuan computing power they offer will be good for all. “Increased investment and a policy focus on AI technologies can unlock new opportunities, from health care and sustainable agriculture to financial services and more,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
“Semiconductors have become almost like the oxygen of the global economy. Without the chips, you can’t breathe,” O’Donnell added. And sooner or later this invasion seems likely, with controlling Taiwan being central to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s goal ofTech firms have since sought to reduce their dependence on Taiwan. Some are adding U.S.