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It might not look like it, but Queretaro is fast becoming Mexico’s data centre hub.

The state plays host to 12 data centres, some owned and operated by the world’s biggest tech companies.

Homemaker Rita Zeferino lives in Mexico's semi-desert state of Querétaro, where a data centre boom promoted by the government has left residents facing strict water rationing and power cuts.

The state is prone to drought, and residents say the needs of data centres are worsening water shortages and straining the electricity grid.

Mexico is attracting ever more sprawling data centres but a shortage of renewable energy means Big Tech is pumping oil, firing up gas generators and using diesel to fuel the global boom in artificial intelligence (AI).

The shortfall in green power - despite pledges by industry and government to grow capacity - has overloaded the country's existing power infrastructure and exacerbated local pollution.

A data centre boom is gathering momentum in central Mexico, where the local government of Querétaro has made it easier for foreign big tech companies to bypass environmental reporting requirements and taxes, an investigation by Context has found.

A dozen data centres operate in the semi-desert state of Querétaro, with most of the massive warehouse-like structures built in the past three years.

Thousands of years from now, future civilisations visiting the Arctic island of Svalbard will stumble upon a treasure trove of data from our age: software from tech companies, documents from the Vatican Museum, famous works of art.

At least, that’s what the Arctic World Archive is counting on. The project, founded by data storage company Piql, says it has found a way to keep digital data safe for thousands of years, safe from everything from solar flares, to flooding, to nuclear bombs. The company says more than 60 institutions from 20 countries have deposited data in its vault, which was built inside the same coal mine as the famous Global Seed Vault.

A two-year long drought in the semi-desert municipality of Colón, in the central Mexican state of Querétaro, has left many struggling with dead crops and water rationing.

But at the same time, the local government in Querétaro is giving incentives to companies to build data centres that generally use large amounts of water to cool their servers.

Artificial intelligence lives on power and water, fed to it in vast quantities by data centres around the world. And those centres are increasingly located in the global south.

One estimate from the University of California, Riverside says AI’s total water demand by 2027 could be more than half the total annual water withdrawal of the UK. But all we really have are estimates. Big tech firms have been secretive about the amount of public water used by individual data centres, and up to half of all data centres don’t even measure how much water they use, according to

We’re creating so much data that soon we’ll be running out of space to store it. Can DNA help us shrink our data hoarding problem?

Modern life is powered by cloud data. But the virtual storage has a hidden carbon footprint – and the AI boom could supercharge it

On paper, Lebanon’s coastline is public and open to all. In practice, it’s a different story.

Activists say up to 80% of the country’s coast is occupied by private businesses that charge for entry, and the remaining 20% is often crowded and full of pollution.