Batam residents protest data centres as taps run dry

Water taps in parts of Batam, an Indonesian island just south of Singapore, have run dry for months, and residents have taken their anger to the data centres built there to power the artificial intelligence boom.

Dozens of people protested outside Nongsa Digital Park, a special economic zone holding data centres and other facilities, at the worst point of the outages, AFP reported in a dispatch published by the Bangkok Post.

Air Batam Hilir, the local water utility, said a long drought caused by low rainfall, worsened by a strong El Nino cycle, had left the Nongsa reservoir very low, and that an electrical fault further disrupted supply. Its spokesman, Ginda Alamsyah, said demand had to be managed properly and that the utility was dredging Batam's six reservoirs and looking at cloud seeding for dry spells.

Residents link the shortages to the data centres, whose servers are often cooled with water. "We cannot eat rice without water. We cannot cook vegetables without water," Juniardi Adinda Sembiring Gurukinayan, a 54-year-old tradesman, told AFP. He said he had sometimes skipped showers.

An industry source told AFP the tech park draws its water from a different reservoir, Duriangkang.

In late September, authorities told developers at Nongsa to build desalination plants for cooling so the facilities would not strain local supplies. Companies with operating or planned data centres there include Singapore-headquartered BW Digital, DayOne and Princeton Digital Group. Hong Kong-based Gaw Capital Partners, another owner, said it was aware of the distress expressed by residents in Nongsa and surrounding communities, and that its facilities must use closed-loop water systems, efficient designs and renewable energy.

Batam mayor Amsakar Achmad, who also heads the BP Batam development authority, said in October, according to local media, that the disruption was not caused by data centres, AI or investors entering the sector, and was due to weather and climate factors. BP Batam and Indonesia's economic affairs ministry, which regulates the park, did not respond to AFP's requests for comment.

In the coastal village of Mata Ikan, resident Rahmat, 52, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, said people had used seawater to wash. Sulastri, 38, said tanker water distributed by the government was "smelly" and "yellowish", and that her small stall could no longer make ice to sell.

Data centre capacity in Southeast Asia is projected to triple from 2025 levels by 2030, driven by a tenfold rise in AI use, according to a KPMG report. Singapore halted new data centre developments between 2019 and 2022 over resource constraints, pushing construction to Batam and to Malaysia's Johor region, which researcher James Chai of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute described as one of the largest emerging AI infrastructure clusters in the world.