A UK-based firm’s recent strategic proposal to build an AI data centre in Dhaka includes an investment of approximately $2 billion. On the surface, this appears to be good news. It will allow for significant technological expansion in Bangladesh, including the development of a Bangla Large Language Model. The company claims that the project will create around 10,000 highly skilled jobs and 50,000 indirect jobs. According to the company, the endeavour is set to make a significant contribution to the economy by increasing the country’s production capacity.
As is generally the case with economic development, environmental degradation goes hand-in-hand. Modern AI data centres use about 20MW to 1 GW of electricity. Under the UK-based firm’s proposal, phase 2 of the plan includes expanding the data centre’s energy capacity to 100-200 MW. This would put extreme pressure on the resources of a country that is already facing significant energy challenges.
Natural gas powers over half of our electricity. Increasing urbanisation, industrial growth and agricultural mechanisation have significantly increased demand for electricity, causing shortages and vast discrepancies between rural and urban electricity availability. Between 2020 and 2024, total gas production declined by 3,918 mmcf. This subjects both the rural and urban population to frequent load-shedding.
One of the proposed locations for this data centre is Gazipur’s Kaliakair Hi-Tech Park. Gazipur is already a district that is suffering greatly because of energy shortages. The garment and textile factories in the area are also under threat of shutting down because of long stretches of load-shedding, which hinder their production processes and result in lower output.
Data centres take up hundreds of acres of land, land that could have been used for agricultural production, pastoral grazing or simply left alone for the existing ecosystem. Gazipur’s forest cover has declined by 23,769 hectares since 2000 and might continue to decline if the data centre project goes ahead. In 2016, Kashimpur Union, an area in Gazipur, had a Simpson’s index for birds of 0.942, meaning that it had a high level of avian diversity. This population has likely declined over the past decade and stands to be at further risk from the construction of a data centre that would disrupt the natural ecosystem through the destruction or fragmentation of their habitats.
Intensive cooling systems are utilised by data centres to prevent servers from overheating. Depending on the size of the data centre, they use anywhere from 1 to 5 million gallons of water each day. This can be detrimental to Gazipur as it has already been facing increasing water scarcity for the past 20 years. Since 2000, 51.42 percent of all water bodies in the district have dried up or been encroached upon. In Kaliganj, Gazipur, overreliance on groundwater has also caused recharge levels to drop from 6 metres in 1990 to 3 metres since 2015. At this rate, if further pressure is put on Gazipur’s scarce water resources, residents will be at risk of losing access to safe, potable water.
In the United States, areas in Texas, Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Indiana and many more face tremendous strains on their water supplies and energy grids. Since the construction of the $750 million Meta data centre in Georgia’s New County, local wells have been irrevocably damaged and municipal water prices have now reached sky-high levels. By 2030, the area is predicted to face a water deficit. There has been up to a 267 percent increase in wholesale electricity costs over the past 5 years in areas near major data centres. Despite being a high-income country, the United States still struggles to cope with the sheer amount of energy and water that these massive data centres require. In comparison, Bangladesh’s electricity grids and water supplies may face even tougher challenges.
Economic growth at the expense of people’s living standards is counterintuitive. A data centre in Bangladesh might serve as a problem-multiplier in our current socioeconomic climate. At a time when people are already struggling to meet their electricity and water needs, this project might exacerbate their struggles while taking the rich biodiversity of our country as collateral.
Ultimately, it is important to ask ourselves what the actual goal is and what we are willing to sacrifice to achieve it. Economic growth is important, but is it worth denying our people basic necessities and causing such large-scale loss of biodiversity?
Rahmin Bari is a Grade 12 student of Playpen School.
[The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Daily Bonik Barta or the organisation they work for.]