Imagine that there is a drought in your region. Children are dying of dehydration and crops are withering under the sun, while you’re asking ChatGPT to turn your pictures into a Ghibli-style portrait, or maybe you’re asking DeepSeek to help you out in writing an article about AI and water theft. This probably sounds like science fiction, but it is soon to become a looming reality. Both AI colonialism and water theft, two phenomena that do not seem to be closely connected at first, are being accused by some of the major tech companies. Let’s see how both of them interconnect.
What is AI Colonialism?
According to the definition presented by Kate Crawford in her book Atlas of AI (2021), AI colonialism is a new kind of neocolonialism. It happens when AI-powered corporations of the Global North (mostly Western and American giant tech corporations) take data and a cheap labor force out of the developing countries with no fair compensation. This continues the inequality around the world and strengthens a digital hierarchy.
In contrast to previous colonialism, which extracted physical capital and manpower to benefit the economy of colonialists, AI colonialism implies taking data, manpower, and privacy in the interests of innovation and the digital age. For example, more than 85 percent of AI applications are created and trained by Western technology organizations. In the meantime, Africa and Asia account for less than 1 percent of this development.
This inequality is experienced in the cultures, economies, and political systems of countries in these continents. The Global South turns into a data warehouse, enjoying very little of its advantages, and its languages, needs, and voices do not receive a significant share of representation or are listened to at all in AI systems.
African Surveillance Technology
Africa has been an epicenter of past colonial exploitation. From the plunder of raw resources by European colonial powers to the plunder of digital private data of individuals, the time has changed, but the culture of colonialism still lingers. From military coups that disturb the political balance to exploitation of markets that fuel the economic crisis, African governments strive for a stable and safe state. According to the report by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the African Digital Rights Network (ADRN), many African countries, like Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco, Zambia, etc., spend more than $1 billion every year on surveillance technology.
These technologies help in the mass surveillance of people via mobile spyware, internet interception, social media monitoring, and others. In 2020, a Nigerian pharmacist was arrested because he posted his thoughts about former President Buhari, which were critical of him and his regime. He was charged with terrorism, sedition, and criminal intimidation of the president. This was one of the cases of mass surveillance. According to the research, these technologies are heavily imported from China, the US, Israel, Britain, and other European nations.
The fastest-growing companies in Africa are Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE. Chinese banks offer huge loans to African governments to buy their surveillance packages from these tech companies. This exploitation by breach of individual data by foreign countries in Africa is a kind of digital neo-colonialism we can see happening today. This exploitation isn’t just digital but also environmental, political, and economic.
What is Water Theft?
Water theft by tech companies means illegally or excessively using the resources of water, paralyzing the work of the public or communal system. Large companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and TikTok have been associated with consuming large quantities of water, mainly to cool their data centers. These data centers carry thousands of servers where data resides, is processed, and is transferred. This necessitates huge amounts of water to keep them cool, and in most cases, this water is taken away at the cost of people in the community.
According to researchers at UC Riverside, to cool down a small data center, the amount of water needed is just as much as the water used by 1,000 households in a day. It also estimates that 20-50 prompts lead to 502.75 ml of fresh water loss in the form of evaporation. It shows AI could demand as much water as the whole of Denmark by the year 2027.
Brazil
Brazil is a perfect example of water theft and AI colonialism. Investigative journalist Lais Martins, in an interview with The Take, a podcast produced by Al Jazeera, cited the example of a TikTok-supported data center going up in a drought-prone coastal area in northeastern Brazil. Despite the development and creation of jobs that companies guarantee, such jobs will be clear once the center has been constructed. And though the possibility of it getting better is appealing, it usually happens at the price of resource exploitation, land acquisition, and environmental compromise over the long term. The hangover is left to the community, which now faces reduced water flow, minimal monitoring, and further marginalization.
Chile
Another moving example is Chile. According to a research paper on the jeopardizing of data center projects in Chile, the area is also water-scarce and experiences droughts, which is why the region is a good fit to attract artificial intelligence and other data giants. There are 16 data centers in Santiago, the capital of Chile, in total, and these are those of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. This is partly so because of fewer regulatory parameters and a weak legal system capable of inhibiting development. While the government looks at it as an opportunity for growth and development, some citizens look at it as a serious threat to the future.
How AI Colonialism Intersects with Water Theft
AI colonialism and water theft might look like two unconnected things at first. Yet there are dramatic similarities between the two. The majority of data centers are positioned strategically within the Global South, areas that are already battling with water shortages, weak regulatory systems, and reductions in economic stability. The reason why tech companies choose to locate in these areas has to do with the cheap land, weak environmental controls, and friendly tax policies. This approach resembles the land grabs of the colonial era, in which resource exploitation is done through weak governance by strong entities.
Such corporations tend to claim economic growth and employment opportunities, yet after establishing the infrastructure, many times promises given are reneged on, and instead of leaving after the creation of resource poverty and environmental pollution. As well, AI systems often fail to embrace indigenous languages like Congolese, Nilo-Saharan, and Bengali languages, further creating forms of cultural exclusion and digital marginalization.
Such companies are given free rein since powerful legal oversight cannot be applied because the companies act with a minimum of accountability, similar to the colonial enterprises of past centuries. Although touting themselves as water positive or generating ethical AI, most of these corporations have been draining water and over-utilizing data and labor moral equivalents, particularly on artists, writers, and marginalized groups, without due rewards or paying heed to long-term externalities.
Conclusion
Both water stealing and AI colonialism portray how big tech reproduces the colonial dynamics under the digital landscape. These are some of the ways that demonstrate that colonialism has been evolving, but in essence, it is still there. The individuals in the Global South still remain to suffer digital and ecological colonization, and usually kindly.
We have to realize that these are exploitative systems, and we have to support digital justice, data sovereignty, and fair access to technology. It is not a struggle to become free of just the ancient empires but also those that are being erected digitally on our lands, using our information and our lives at the expense of our futures.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Tayyaba Naseer is pursuing her bachelor's degree in international relations from Government College University, Lahore. She chooses to write about the most significant human emotions and the world we live in. She is passionate about unearthing the hidden conspiracies that create our world and how every one of us is interlinked in this intricate web.
