The World Is Starting to Say No to the AI Land Grab
In one English town, residents told to save water while Europe's biggest server farm ran its chillers flat out. From Slough to Santiago to a Kentucky farm, the backlash has begun - and it's winning
Start in Slough. During this month’s heat dome, with the UK pushing toward 40 degrees, residents of the town west of Heathrow began asking a simple question: why does it feel even hotter here? One local described the air as something that pinches your body and burns your skin - an observation members of the World Briefing team, who live there, have been making all summer. The answer hums behind the high street. Slough is Europe’s largest data centre hub - roughly 40 facilities drawing a full gigawatt for Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle - and a Cambridge study (not yet peer-reviewed) finds such clusters raise surrounding temperatures by an average of 2°C, up to 9°C close in. During the heatwave, the weather station beside the server campus ran markedly hotter than the one across town. And as Thames Water pleaded with households to skip the paddling pool and go easy on the taps, the chillers next door ran flat out. That’s the whole story in one postcode: when the heat comes, the machines and the people need cooling - and water, and power - on exactly the same days. Climate change doesn’t just sharpen the competition for scarce resources. It synchronizes it.
Slough isn’t an outlier; it’s a preview. And the world is beginning to push back against the AI land grab - for the first time, successfully.
The newest data point: on Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order imposing the first statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers in the US - a pause of up to a year on permits for any facility drawing 50 megawatts or more, freezing a $10 billion pipeline while the state writes binding rules on energy, water and community benefits. Her framing was blunt: she refuses to let the costs land on ratepayers.
But New York is a latecomer. Ireland got there first - the hard way. Data centers consumed 23 per cent of all Irish electricity in 2025, by far the highest share in the OECD; a UN agency report last month cited Ireland as a “cautionary tale” for the AI age. Dublin’s grid operator imposed a de facto moratorium years ago, and the government only recently lifted national restrictions on condition that 80 per cent of a new facility’s energy comes from renewables. The Netherlands restricted hyperscale construction nationally. Singapore ran a three-year moratorium. Denmark’s grid operator paused all new large-scale connections this spring after roughly 14 gigawatts of data center requests piled up - double the country’s peak electricity demand. In Chile, a court suspended a Google data center after residents discovered it would extract more than 7 billion litres of water a year in a region enduring a 15-year megadrought. Protests have hit projects in Mexico, Malaysia, Canada, Brazil, Spain and the UK.
The heat dome exposed how systemic the collision has become. Cooling can eat up to 40 per cent of a data centre’s electricity, and that share climbs precisely when grids are most stressed; in evaporative systems, nearly 80 per cent of the drinking-quality water used simply vanishes into the air. In France, a nuclear reactor at Golfech shut down because the river water was too hot to cool it — even as demand spiked. On the US East Coast, the largest grid operator asked for authority to order data centres onto backup generators to keep the lights on for households. England’s Environment Agency now warns that data centre demand spikes during heatwaves threaten already water-stressed London and the Southeast — and the national framework projecting a 5-billion-litre daily water deficit by 2055 didn’t factor in data centre growth at all.
AI-related water consumption could equal the basic annual domestic needs of 1.3 billion people by the end of the decade, while its land footprint may exceed 14,500 square kilometres — roughly twice the size of the Jakarta metropolitan area - UN University
Canada, characteristically, is sleepwalking into the same fight. New research from York University’s Schulich School of Business - the first comprehensive map of Canada’s data centre landscape - counts just five hyperscale facilities operating today against 96 proposed or under construction, a pipeline nearly ten times the existing footprint. More than 90 per cent of that planned capacity is headed for a single province: Alberta, home to one of the country’s highest-emissions grids. The study’s authors note that a single facility can draw as much electricity as tens of thousands of households while creating comparatively few long-term jobs - a 100-megawatt centre consumes the equivalent of roughly 40,000 to 64,000 Canadian homes - and warn of reshaped provincial power systems, rising emissions and other users crowded off the grid. Provinces with clean power - Quebec, Ontario, B.C. - are already rationing access, which is precisely why the buildout is migrating to where the electrons are dirtiest and the scrutiny thinnest. Canadians have noticed even if Ottawa hasn’t: Angus Reid Institute polling finds 68 per cent would oppose a large AI data centre within a few blocks of their home, rising to 73 per cent among rural residents - and the resistance is already scoring wins, from Premier Kinew pulling the plug on a massive Manitoba project to Hamilton council advancing a moratorium. Yet the national conversation Ottawa hasn’t had - power draw, foreign ownership of critical digital infrastructure, stranded-asset risk if the boom cools - remains a decision being made by default. Sound familiar?
The human face of all this is in Mason County, Kentucky, where 82-year-old Ida Huddleston and her daughter Delsia Bare have refused more than US$26 million - roughly ten times local land value - from an unnamed Fortune 100 company assembling a 2,080-acre hyperscale site around their 200-year-old family farm. The county rezoned in May anyway. Twenty-eight neighbours in a mobile home park got 90-day eviction notices. The buyer has never publicly said its own name; county documents call it only “the prospect.” The family and a residents’ group are fighting on in court - and they have company: US data center project cancellations quadrupled to 25 in 2025, and the world’s largest planned complex, beside Virginia’s Manassas Civil War battlefield, died outright this month after residents won in court.
And the buildout is reaching places with no backlash infrastructure at all. Outside Yerevan - as our reporting trip to Armenia this spring found - construction is underway on Firebird’s Nvidia-powered “AI factory,” a project that has since swelled to US$4 billion and 50,000 GPUs, announced with the US vice president standing beside Prime Minister Pashinyan. For a small state squeezed between Russia (via Georgia), Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkey, hosting one of the world’s largest GPU clusters is statecraft as much as commerce - American chips as a security umbrella. It is also a preview of where the industry goes when the West says no: to emerging economies where the grid questions, water questions and consent questions haven’t yet been asked.
Now set all of that against the demand curve. The IEA projects global data center electricity consumption will more than double by 2030 from 2024 levels. Nikkei Asia reports Nvidia is in talks with Mitsubishi Heavy - a gas-turbine and power-plant maker - to supply cooling and energy infrastructure for these AI factories. When the industry itself starts procuring power-plant-grade hardware, the villagers, farmers and ratepayers packing hearings from Maysville to Malaysia aren’t Luddites. They’re early.
The AI buildout has collided with the oldest political force on earth: people defending their land, water and utility bills. Big Tech has the capital. What it doesn’t yet have - anywhere - is the consent.
As Huddleston put it: “Money don’t mean anything if you don’t have food, water and can’t breathe. And they’re not making any more land. You can’t get food out of a data center.”
The Recruitment War: How Russia Widened Its Net Across Africa
From Enzokuhle Jojo - our correspondent in Cape Town
Russia’s war in Ukraine has always had a second front, and it runs quietly through Africa. The pattern behind it has been remarkably consistent: young men offered work that led instead to the battlefield, with financial desperation doing much of the recruiting Moscow never had to do itself. Investigations by the International Crisis Group and others have documented recruitment efforts reaching Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.
Then came the women - lured by promises of hospitality and logistics jobs in Russia’s Republic of Tatarstan, only to find themselves assembling Shahed drones at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone. France 24 traced parts of that campaign to South African influencers, among them Cyan Boujee, who later said she too had been misled. South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation went so far as to publicly warn young women about the scheme, including in interviews on Radio 702, as Africa Defense Forum reported. A May 2025 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime found that some of those recruited into the Alabuga programme were reportedly as young as fifteen.
The methods kept evolving. Social media became the pipeline’s most effective tool, with influencers - knowingly or not - lending credibility to offers that looked more trustworthy than any official advertisement. Among the most widely reported cases were allegations, published by African Business, linking a recruitment operation to Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, daughter of former President Jacob Zuma - allegations she denies. Alabuga remains the clearest window into just how far this network reached. The evidence of deceptive recruitment, across multiple countries and multiple cases, is by now substantial.
But a recent POLITICO report complicates the picture. Some captured African fighters in Ukrainian custody now say they knew exactly what they were signing up for. There was no deception, by their account; the money was the attraction. One Congolese fighter, who goes by the nickname “Avatar”, told POLITICO he now considers Russia home, has family there, and would rather be returned to Russia in a prisoner exchange than go back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Such statements demand caution. Prisoners of war speak under conditions where incentives, fear and uncertainty about their own future shape what they choose to say. Their testimony does not erase the documented record of deception - but it does suggest the reality is messier than a clean division between victims and perpetrators.
And that messiness may itself serve the recruiters. If enough ambiguity surrounds how individuals entered the system, accountability becomes far harder to pursue. A recruit who insists he acted voluntarily is harder for Ukraine to hold up as evidence of exploitation, and harder for African governments to invoke when pressing Moscow for answers. Whether such testimony reflects genuine choice, coercion, survival instinct or some blend of all three, the practical effect is identical: the broader pattern becomes easier to dispute.
Which is precisely why the pattern matters more than any single testimony. One captured fighter’s account may be entirely genuine and still not overturn the wider body of evidence showing how this pipeline has operated across the continent - adapting its methods over time to target jobless young men, women promised legitimate work, underage girls reportedly funnelled into Alabuga, and influencers capable of manufacturing trust at scale.
The question for African governments and journalists, then, is not whether every recruit was purely a victim. It is whether the documented evidence - how the pipeline operates, who facilitated it, who profited, and who failed to stop it - will outlast the news cycle that briefly exposed it. So far, the record is not encouraging: these stories surface, generate headlines, and quietly disappear long before accountability catches up.
News Briefs
Iran has threatened to block further trading routes in the region, as the US launched a fresh wave of strikes on military targets. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said the Strait of Hormuz would remain shut until the US ends its “acts of aggression” and said other regional oil and gas export channels could also be closed. The warning came as the US military’s Central Command (Centcom) said it had carried out drone, air and navy strikes on Iran on Wednesday morning, in addition to a seven-hour operation overnight. US President Donald Trump vowed to strike Iran’s bridges and power plants next week if the country does not return to talks. “I’ll save the energy targets for last, but ultimately we’ll hit energy targets,” Trump said in an interview on Special Report with Bret Baier that aired on Tuesday night. The escalation in rhetoric comes after Trump said a 20% toll he had threatened to impose in the Strait of Hormuz would be replaced by “massive” trade and investment deals with Gulf states. A renewed US blockade on Iranian ports was imposed on Tuesday evening, which stops vessels from transiting to and from Iranian ports and coastal areas. In response, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned the US that it should “expect the closure of other oil and gas export routes that serve the interests of the United States and its allies”. It did not elaborate on which routes could be affected. Meanwhile, Iran's state-run broadcaster reported that the country's army had carried out separate attacks on US targets in Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain - BBC
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) on Tuesday reinstated and toughened its warning to airlines operating in the Middle East, telling them to avoid the airspace of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and over the Gulf of Oman as the U.S.-Iran war flared up again. Just a week ago, EASA withdrew its previous advisory following a brief easing of regional tensions as a result of last month’s interim ceasefire between Tehran and Washington. That warning had asked airlines to exercise caution when operating within the airspace of these countries, as well as Israel, Jordan, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. "The presence of major US military facilities in the region increases the likelihood that the states covered by this Conflict Zone Information Bulletin may be directly exposed to Iranian missile and drone attacks," EASA said, citing also the risk of misidentification of civil aircraft by U.S. and other air defence systems - Reuters
Russia and Ukraine stepped up their battle over the Black Sea and key trade routes on Wednesday, with Russian forces killing three people in an attack on the Ukrainian port city of Odesa and Kyiv’s drone forces striking Russian shipping. Odesa region Governor Oleh Kiper said Russian drone and missile strikes on the southern region continued for a fifth day, with civilian, industrial and port infrastructure coming under attack. Three people were killed and at least three others were injured after a Russian missile hit a seven-story residential building in Odesa, Ukrainian authorities said. In a statement, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it continued overnight strikes on Ukrainian ports it claimed were handling cargoes for the Ukrainian military. It said a number of targets in the ports of Odesa and nearby Chornomorsk port had been hit, as well as four vessels it said were delivering cargoes for Ukraine’s forces in the ports of Chornomorsk and Dnipro-Buh. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s top drone commander said Wednesday that Kyiv hit 20 Russian vessels in the Black Sea overnight - Reuters
US President Donald Trump said he still believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to make a deal to end the war in Ukraine soon, despite continued attacks and some indications Russia was likely to escalate the conflict. “I think he's ready to make a deal,” Trump said in a Fox News interview when asked about his conversations with Putin. The interview was taped on Tuesday and aired on Wednesday. Three sources close to the Kremlin told Reuters that Putin is rejecting calls to negotiate peace with Kyiv and was likely to escalate the conflict, now in its fifth year. Trump had promised to have a deal to the war, now in its fifth year, on the first day of his presidency in January 2025 - Reuters
US Coast Guard ships that previously operated in the Middle East have been deployed to Singapore and the Philippines, as Washington looks to challenge China’s assertion of power in the Pacific Ocean. Tensions have risen in the region as Beijing has sought to expand its maritime and territorial claims, pushing Asian leaders to strengthen security alliances: Defense spending in Asia and Oceania rose by more than 8% last year, the biggest leap in almost two decades. The US too is ramping up its security apparatus in the Pacific, upgrading airfields, testing advanced missile systems, and training with other allied nations. However, deterring Beijing in its backyard “will remain a challenge” for Washington, The Wall Street Journal reported.
While Politico's CEO was boasting on LinkedIn that the outlet "sets the news agenda" in Brussels, its Belgian filings were telling a different story. Former chief correspondent Matthew Karnitschnig reports the European arm's net loss ballooned to nearly €2 million in 2025 — up from roughly €300,000 the year before — despite record revenue of almost €48 million. The loss wiped out the company's remaining equity, triggering Belgium's statutory 'alarm bell' governance procedure, with owner Axel Springer pledging to step into the breach if needed. Expansion into France and Germany has reportedly underperformed commercially, headcount is down by about 50 — and with Springer's attention shifting to its new Telegraph acquisition, the once-favourite child of the Döpfner empire suddenly looks expendable.
The journals…
