Afət Ziyadqızı
Residents facing a severe shortage of drinking water staged a mass protest on Indonesia’s Batam Island. A group of about 300 demonstrators entered the Nongsa Digital Park technology park to protest the operation of data centers on the island.
Operative Information Center-OMM reports that protesters carrying empty water containers and jugs expressed anger that large technology facilities continued to have water supplies while residents were facing interruptions to their water service.
Dewi Susanti, a resident of Bakau Serip village, told the media that centralized water had not been supplied to the settlement for three months. She said residents had been forced to use poor-quality water delivered by tanker trucks, which she described as being in unsanitary condition.
The Batam Water Utility said the crisis was due to a prolonged drought and a sharp decline in rainfall. Utility officials denied claims that water resources were deliberately being diverted to data centers, adding that work was underway to restore infrastructure.
Cooling systems used to prevent servers in modern data centers from overheating can consume large volumes of water. International research conducted in the United States estimates that a typical data center uses about 1.14 million liters of water per day, equivalent to the daily household consumption of 1,000 families.
Batam, home to 1.3 million people, faces additional water challenges because of its limited natural sources of freshwater. The island’s population depends on rainwater collected in six artificial reservoirs. Local environmental groups estimate that if the drought continues, the Nongsa reservoir, which supplies Bakau Serip, could run completely dry within a month.
