By Don Mort, local democracy reporter
A backlash to the building of a Microsoft data centre is gathering pace after Green Party councillors voiced their opposition.
The 11 councillors – including ward members in Armley and Kirkstall wards – said the development at the former Skelton Grange power station was against the city council’s commitments to address climate change.
More than 40,000 people have already signed a petition against the “hyperscale” data centre plan, which was given planning permission in April.
Those opposing the scheme in Stourton have raised concerns over the amount of water and electricity it would use.
A Leeds Green Party statement said: “Residents have raised serious concerns about energy and water consumption, flood risk, heat generation and the impact on local communities.
“While planning approval now appears to have been granted and the council’s ability to reverse that decision is extremely limited, we will continue pushing for answers and for the highest possible environmental standards if the development proceeds.”
The city’s eleven Green councillors called on Microsoft to use waste energy from the site to heat homes and implement flood protection measures. This included Cllr Joe Ingham (Kirkstall) and Armley councillors Clancy Walker and Lou Cunningham.
They said: “Leeds deserves development that benefits communities and the climate, not projects that undermine the city’s own environmental ambitions.”
Microsoft said it was investing billions of pounds into “critical national infrastructure” projects in the UK.
The company said people living near the proposed Leeds centre took part in a public consultation.
A spokesperson said: “The proposed facility would be air-cooled for more than 95 per cent of the time.
“We match all our energy use with renewable energy in the UK and Microsoft remains committed to our goals of becoming carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030.”
Leeds City Council said approval of the planning application was in line with national legislation and policies.
A council spokesperson said: “A substantial proportion of the development’s operational water needs will be met through the use of a rainwater harvesting system, while planning conditions will ensure that waste heat is appropriately managed and, where possible, reused.”
The scheme includes three data centre buildings housing computer servers, as well as a warehouse with up to 161,000 sq ft (15,000 sq m), of floorspace.
So we can look forward to the Green Party removing all its data from the web and not appearing on any media outlets.
Don’t they realise that even looking at this amazing website requires the use of data.
Already we have the worst mobile coverage in Western Europe because of Nimbyism and activism let’s not make the mistake with data.
A web page is only a few kilobytes of static data. A Twitter or Facebook post is just a row in a SQL database. All these new data centres are popping up solely because of the stupid quest for so-called Artificial Intelligence full of high-performance computer hardware wasting vast amounts of electricity, water and computer hardware to deliver something that isn’t intelligent at all because of the fundamental way it can only process and respond to queries by pattern matching pre-existing human-created training data. Ask AI to do something that requires the human ability to think properly or a question that is unlikely to exist in training data and it returns a load of hallucinated rubbish.
Absolutely and it doesn’t seem to understand space either, give it an annotated image and ask where to position items in a room and it can’t cope, mixing up right with left and vice versa, even marking noon at the top of the image and asking if an object should be moved clockwise or counterclockwise it will get it the wrong way round – no, the other clockwise?. All I wanted to know was where to place a couple of chairs in my room for best effect, result = chaos. I’d have been better off asking Laurel & Hardy to sort it out for me.
Please do your research. These facilities are not the same. One of our local councillors who gave the nod for this facility, also admitted in email to not knowing the differences. Worrying that have people lacking knowledge, making these decisions and assessing risks.
Wy do they need a vast amount of water
The servers and GPU’s in the data centre are all liquid cooled using water. Most data centres either use evaporative cooling (take fresh water, pump it through the servers and then let it evaporate) or they extract groundwater, pump it through the servers and then pump it back into the ground contaminated with oil and antifreeze chemicals from the cooling equipment.
Each time you ask AI to answer a question or generate an image that uses about 2 tablespoons of water in cooling. 10 seconds of AI generated video uses up a whopping 4 litres of water in cooling.