Batam residents protest as data centres grow and their taps run dry

Hundreds of people in Batam, an Indonesian island near Singapore, have protested outside a data centre park. They say their homes have had no running water for months while the facilities have kept their servers cool, the BBC reported.

The protest took place on October 5 at the gate of Nongsa Digital Park, according to environmental news site Mongabay Indonesia.

Protesters, many of them women from the village of Bakau Serip, carried empty water jugs and blocked workers from entering, it reported.

“Not a single drop has come through our taps for the last three months… Our water supply had been reliable until the data centres came,” protester Dewi Susanti told the BBC.

Residents now rely on tanker trucks, she said, and some pay for drums of water that last a single day.

BP Batam, the agency that runs trade and industry on the island, denies that household water is being sent to data centres. It blames a long dry spell, which may be linked to a strong El Niño, the BBC reported.

An agency official told Mongabay that the park’s data centres draw cooling water from a separate industrial estate.

Batam has no natural freshwater sources, and its 1.3 million people depend on rain collected in six man-made reservoirs.

The reservoir that serves Bakau Serip could dry up within a month without rain, a local environmental group estimated.

Earlier protests took place in August and September. Since then, officials have told data centre firms to make fresh water from seawater instead of using reservoirs, the BBC said.

Officials have cleared 10 data centres in Batam, six of them in the Nongsa park. Two are working, one is being built, and six or more are awaiting approval, according to BP Batam. Investment on the island tops $6.7 billion.

Much of that comes from nearby Singapore, an hour away by ferry, which limited the number of new data centres between 2019 and 2022. In June, Nvidia-backed Firmus announced a 360MW AI data centre on Batam with Singapore’s DayOne.

Data centre power demand on the island is expected to pass 1,100MW by 2030, according to official estimates. Across Southeast Asia, data centre investment is set to more than double by 2031.

It is not clear how much water the Batam data centres use. Companies often treat those figures as secret, Agus Hasan, who teaches at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, told the BBC.