From the freeway, Querétaro nonetheless seems like a painter’s trick of the mild—the ochre of 18th-century stone punched towards a blue sky, the well-known aqueduct’s 74 arches striding over rooftops as if time itself had been load-bearing. Up shut, the postcard has new margins. Windowless rectangles rise behind partitions topped with cameras. Cranes swing over pads strung with high-voltage cable. Fiber conduits braid into substations the measurement of supermarkets. The metropolis that when grew on water now grows on bandwidth.
A Colonial Postcard, Now a Server Farm
Microsoft broke floor right here. So did Amazon Web Services. Brazilian-backed Ascenty and São Paulo’s ODATA adopted. Others are parked behind development fences, their names but to be stenciled onto perimeter signage. State officers speak about greater than $10 billion in data-center funding over the subsequent decade and gesture to the proof: caravans of switchgear and chillers crawling the toll highway, resort lobbies with lanyards and English, a skyline the place cold-aisle house is a development metric.
“The demand for AI is accelerating the construction of data centres at an unprecedented speed,” stated Shaolei Ren, an affiliate professor {of electrical} and laptop engineering at the University of California, Riverside, in an interview with the BBC. Generative fashions crave compute; compute eats energy and cooling; energy and cooling demand locations that may ship each with out years of grid-queue purgatory. “The power grid capacity constraint in the US is pushing tech companies to find available power anywhere they can,” Ren instructed the BBC. Land is cheaper right here. Permits—when the governor’s workplace leans in—arrive sooner.
“It’s a very strategic region,” stated Arturo Bravo, Ascenty’s Mexico nation supervisor, strolling a customer by way of a buzzing corridor the place the loudest sound was the rind-peel whine of followers. He instructed the BBC he can level north to Mexico City, south to ports, east and west to interconnections. “Querétaro is right in the middle, connecting east, west, north and south,” he stated. The state and metropolis “identified [the area] as a technology hub,” smoothing zoning and regulation. In his forecast, the skyline is coded into the algorithm. “I do see it just kind of progressing and progressing, with a new data centre there every few years,” he stated. “The industry will continue to grow as AI grows.”
Water, Heat and the Hidden Costs of Cool
Step into a information corridor on a scorching afternoon and the first sensation is a sort of manufactured climate. Cold air pours from the ground in a managed gale, spills round black cupboards that blink like beehives, and exits behind them 5 or ten levels hotter. The physics are banal and unforgiving: each watt that feeds a chip have to be eliminated as warmth. Do it with evaporative cooling, and also you devour water. Do it with air and compressors, and also you devour a lot extra electrical energy—a lot of it nonetheless made, in Mexico, with fuel and steam.
Scale is what makes the arithmetic really feel like a risk. A modest evaporative-cooled facility can use tens of thousands and thousands of liters of water a 12 months. Querétaro has “scores” of websites, by the state’s personal estimate, with dozens extra in the pipeline. The counters are actual—operators emphasize that crops are usually not equal. Ascenty says its websites are closed-loop, circulating the identical water by way of chillers fairly than venting it into the sky. Microsoft instructed the BBC its three Querétaro campuses use direct outside air for cooling “approximately 95% of the year,” switching to evaporative methods solely when the mercury crosses 29.4°C, and reported 40 million liters of water use throughout these amenities in fiscal 2025. The nuance issues. So does the zoom-out. Google disclosed in its newest sustainability report that whole water consumption throughout its operations rose 28% 12 months over 12 months to roughly 8.1 billion gallons; it harassed that 72% of the freshwater it used got here from basins at “low risk of water depletion.” The the rest, by definition, didn’t.
In Querétaro, the context is harsh. Last 12 months’s drought was the worst in a century. Hills went khaki. Reservoirs confirmed their bones. In colonias up in the foothills, the afternoon faucet ran air. “Private industries are being prioritised in these arid zones,” stated Teresa Roldán, an activist in the metropolis’s north, sitting at a kitchen desk with a jug of water that arrived by truck, in an interview with the BBC. “We hear that there’s going to be 32 data centres but water is what’s needed for the people, not for these industries. They [the municipality] are prioritising giving the water they have to the private industry. Citizens are not receiving the same quality of the water than the water that the industry is receiving.”
Officials flinch at the accusation. “We have always said and reiterated that the water is for citizen consumption, not for the industry,” a spokesperson for the state authorities instructed the BBC, noting that below Mexican legislation it’s the National Water Commission, not municipalities, that points concessions and volumes. On paper, that’s true. In a home the place the 6 p.m. pot can’t be stuffed, it feels like a footnote. “This is a state that is already facing a crisis that is so complex and doesn’t have enough water for human disposal,” stated Claudia Romero Herrara, who based the water-rights initiative Bajo Tierra Museo del Agua, additionally chatting with the BBC. “The priority should be water for basic means… that’s what we need to guarantee and then maybe think if there are some resources available for any other economic activity. There has been a conflict of interest on public water policy for the last two decades.”
Transparency, Trust and a Thirsty State
Data facilities promote belief by the 9—99.999%—and their secrecy is a part of the pitch: bodily safety, shopper confidentiality, no surprises. That mindset strains in a drought. Ask ten Querétaro residents what number of amenities already hum inside the ring highway and also you’ll get a shrug, a rumor, a quantity that begins with “scores.” The first step towards coexistence, activists say, is daylight. How many websites? Which basins? How a lot water, month by month, at the fence line and upstream at the energy plant that boils the steam that spins the generators that feed the megawatts?
That final hyperlink is straightforward to miss. A campus that makes use of little or no water on website nonetheless has an oblique water footprint if its electrical energy comes from thermal crops. Mexico’s grid stays dominated by fuel. Hydropower contributes however is hostage to rain. Solar and wind are rising quick from a small base. Without trustworthy basin-level accounting—the form utilities publish for consuming water—Querétaro’s data-center growth seems like a non-public story written with public ink.
Ren, the UC Riverside professor, added a second variable: air. “The danger of diesel pollutants from data centres has been well recognised,” he instructed the BBC, pointing to a Washington State Department of Ecology evaluation that discovered troubling air-quality impacts close to dense clusters of backup turbines. Querétaro crops stack dozens of these engines in tidy rows. They run not often, by design—as insurance coverage towards grid blinks—however once they do, the plumes are actual. The repair just isn’t mysterious: stricter emissions controls, stack placement away from neighborhoods, real-time monitoring that anybody can see.
Bravo’s reply is procedural. “We operate under the terms and conditions specified by authorities,” he stated to the BBC. It is authorities’s job, in his telling, to set the guidelines that shield well being and to implement them “so conditions are acceptable for the communities around.” He is correct, and never full. Efficiency is actual—new crops wring extra work from each watt than their predecessors. But effectivity is a ratio. If AI fashions preserve getting extra compute-hungry—and so they have, dramatically—then whole consumption can climb at the same time as per-rack numbers fall.
EFE@Enric Fontcuberta
Diesel, Megawatts and the Future on the Line
Every boomtown invents a story to dwell by. Querétaro’s is elegant: a metropolis could be two locations directly. In the morning you eat chilaquiles below the arches. In the afternoon you drive previous a campus the place a thousand racks hum a thousand miles from the individuals who will ask a chatbot a query a week from Tuesday. The promise is jobs with insulation from macro shocks—technicians, electricians, safety personnel—paid in pesos that keep and flow into. It is status with out smoke stacks. It is a likelihood to be a switchboard for the continent.
What the promise turns into can be determined in locations far much less photogenic than the aqueduct’s overlook: committee rooms the place permits are formed, kitchens the place tanker deliveries are logged, substations the place utility engineers make the math work in August. There are levers corporations can pull now to easy their welcome. Publish month-to-month water-use information and energy draw at the campus stage; fund restoration and recharge upstream; push dry and hybrid cooling even when it prices extra in electrical energy throughout May and June when reservoirs sag; co-site photo voltaic and storage to shave peak demand; set up Tier 4 emissions controls on diesel and level these stacks away from colleges; wire up screens that show air and noise information at the fence line in numbers your neighbor can learn.
There are levers authorities should pull. The state can require the disclosure it says it can’t compel. It can put a public dashboard below the aqueduct picture on its web site: concessions, withdrawals, basin well being, grid stress, generator run hours. It can write a rule that claims: when faucets sputter at midday in Santa Rosa Jáuregui, each discretionary water person in the basin throttles again or shifts to reuse. It can maintain hearings in neighborhood halls fairly than resort ballrooms and ensure the microphones level out as a lot as in.
Querétaro just isn’t the first place to straddle a paradox, and it received’t be the final. The ironies land tougher right here as a result of the symbols are so stark. The metropolis’s most beloved piece of infrastructure was constructed to ensure development; the subsequent period of development might falter if it can’t assure the factor the arches as soon as carried. The BBC requested Microsoft and Ascenty to elucidate their operations; each did, in the language of engineers—dry air, temperature thresholds, closed loops, compliance. Residents spoke in the language of kitchens and buckets. “The priority should be water for basic means,” Romero Herrara stated. “Then maybe think if there are some resources available for any other economic activity.”
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If Querétaro will get the stability proper—if disclosure turns into regular, conservation turns into behavior, and smarter engineering bends the extraction curve—the postcard can keep trustworthy in a couple of approach. Stone arches as soon as carried water to a thirsty metropolis. Fiber and megawatts can, with care, carry prosperity again. The check won’t be what the data-center brochures say. It can be whether or not, at 6 p.m. on a scorching day, the faucet in a hillside colonia nonetheless runs. And whether or not, when somebody seems up from that sink and out at the arches, they really feel pleased with each the previous and the future below them.