Malaysia's Johor Bans Low-Tier Data Centers Over Water Strain (thestar.com.my)
- Reference: 0180215425
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/26/1332218/malaysias-johor-bans-low-tier-data-centers-over-water-strain
- Source link: https://www.thestar.com.my/metro/metro-news/2025/11/26/no-more-low-tier-data-centre-approvals-in-johor
The Malaysian state has approved 51 data center projects as of November 2025. 17 centers are already operational, 11 are under construction and 23 received approval this year. The announcement follows concerns raised by a local politician who pointed to water supply disruptions in Georgia in the US after a data center began operations and protests in Uruguay over fears that data centers could affect farms.
[1] https://www.thestar.com.my/metro/metro-news/2025/11/26/no-more-low-tier-data-centre-approvals-in-johor
Georgia on my mind (Score:3)
I live in Georgia, hadn't heard about the data center issue here, and TFA doesn't source the claim. Believable, but where, when, who? Anybody have that story?
Re: (Score:1)
[1]Meta's Data Center Construction Causes Water Crisis in Newton County, Georgia [ainvest.com]
[1] https://www.ainvest.com/news/meta-data-center-construction-water-crisis-newton-county-georgia-2507/
Re: (Score:2)
You never thought to Google for the answer? There are several sources.
Re: Georgia on my mind (Score:1)
Were they written by AI?
Re: Georgia on my mind (Score:2)
It's almost impossible to find good sources. Most don't even tell you what sort of cooling is being used and are just shouting vaguely. Finding an article that actually tells you where the water is drawn from and where it goes is rare, because that would take actual effort to report and might take away from the currently popular "Big Tech BAD" narrative.
AI as a sacred prestige competition (Score:3)
A theocratic sunk cost trap can push a society into a subsistence sacrifice spiral, where ordinary people steadily give up food, rest, and local security to sustain ever growing ritual commitments, producing a chronic pious infrastructure gap in which roads, storage, and irrigation lag far behind temples and shrines. Through ritual resource diversion and ritualized inequality, elites justify extracting labor and surplus for sacred projects, while sacred prestige competition among factions drives each group to sponsor bigger monuments, feasts, and pilgrimages than its rivals.
Over time, ideological rigidity and cosmological lock in make it politically dangerous to question these priorities, even as devotional self exhaustion thins the community’s reserves and eschatological neglect encourages people to discount long term environmental or infrastructural risks. When shocks such as drought, war, or trade disruption finally hit, the result can be monumental overextension.
A landscape dominated by impressive sacred architecture but lacking the resilience to cope, leaving behind a sacred shell civilization where the structures remain imposing while the society that built them has fragmented, shrunk, or transformed beyond recognition.
Re: (Score:2)
AI Slop, all of it. "A theocratic sunk cost trap"? I admit religions are a cost trap, but they are not connected to data centers.....unless.....could it be.....God just announced he'll be acquiring land for data centers to handle the rush of prayers from people asking for divine intervention for their troubles.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the parent commenter was proposing an analogy to the various temples-overtaken-by-jungle and cathedrals-and-hovels societies; where the competing c-suites of the magnificent seven and aspirants suck our society dry to propitiate the promised machine god.
I have to say; datacenters will not make for terribly impressive ruins compared to historical theological white elephant projects. Truly, the future archeologists will say, this culture placed great value in cost engineered sheds for the shed god.
Re: (Score:2)
> AI Slop, all of it. "A theocratic sunk cost trap"?
Not sure why you think this is AI slop. It's an interesting argument. Not sure I agree, but it's a different take.
> I admit religions are a cost trap, but they are not connected to data centers
The connection is right in the subject line: it is comparing AI to a "sacred prestige competition." The central idea is that AI is like religion in that it promises great and wonderful rewards in the future if we make sacrifices in the present, and if we don't see any of these great and wonderful rewards: that's because we're not sacrificing enough . It becomes a death spiral: the worse things ge
Just use sea water. (Score:4, Interesting)
In Portugal we have a $10 billion datacenter being built by Microsoft where a large thermal power plant used to be... it uses sea water for cooling just like the power plant used to. Beachgoers love the warm water. Sea water is not exactly scarce and there's no shortage of shoreline in Malaysia...
Re: (Score:2)
The idea of people bathing in the effluent of a datacenter is peak dystopian. I love it.
Re: (Score:2)
> The idea of people bathing in the effluent of a datacenter is peak dystopian. I love it.
What in the world do you think happens to the output of sewage treatment plants? Do you think it's teleported to Pluto?
All the water you ever bathed in has effluents that have gone through the kidneys of scores of animals. Merely warming water by a few degrees is trivial.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know why, perhaps seawater costs more to use because of salt. It is pretty clear from the article, they are using drinking water resources, which people use.
Why not kill two birds with one stone? (Score:1)
Have they considered just throwing the poor into furnaces to power the AI?
Air cooling (Score:1)
They never heard of direct to air cooling? There is no need to evaporate clean water.
Re: (Score:2)
At least for new builds/major conversions; it's often a matter of incentives.
There's certainly some room for shenanigans with power prices; but unless it's an outright subsidy in-kind you normally end up paying something resembling the price an industrial customer would. Water prices, though, vary wildly from basically-free/plunder-the-aquifer-and-keep-what-you-find stuff that was probably a bad idea even when they were farming there a century or two ago; to something that might at least resemble a comme
Re: (Score:2)
> They never heard of direct to air cooling? There is no need to evaporate clean water.
Air cooling is quite inefficient compared to water cooling. The heat of vaporization of water, 2260 kJ/kg, is remarkable. It will remove a lot of heat. Even the thermal mass of water, with a specific heat of about 4.2 kJ K/kg, is pretty impressive.