41,000 Sign Petition Against Microsoft's $5.4 Billion Leeds Data Center
A petition against Microsoft's planned $5.4 billion AI data center in Leeds, England has gathered over 41,000 signatures.
The collective of 100 people who started the petition claims that the project poses a risk to the health and wellbeing of local residents and the surrounding environment due to its water usage and carbon emissions.
The data center will require large amounts of water to cool its chips, which is a concern given England's hot summer this year. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated earlier that the daily water usage over the course of an entire year for a data center is roughly equivalent to what a single restaurant would use.
The petition also highlights the massive energy consumption of the project, with over 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide expected to be released over its planned 60-year lifetime. This is almost equivalent to one year's worth of the UK's entire emissions.