Brazil: TikTok datacentre will allegedly use "vast amounts of water" in a region already affected by droughts; incl. companies' comments
Agência Gov
"Draining cities dry: the giant tech companies queueing up to build datacentres in drought-hit Latin America", 22 May 2025
...It is a warehouse the size of 12 football pitches that promises to create much-needed jobs and development in Caucaia city, north-east Brazil. But it won’t have shelves stocked with products. This vast building will be a datacentre, believed to be earmarked for TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app, as part of a 55bn reais (£7.3bn) project to expand its global datacentre infrastructure.
...The choice of Caucaia is no accident. Several undersea cables carry data from the nearby capital of Ceará state, Fortaleza, to other continents. The closer to the cables, the greater the traffic capacity and the lower the latency, or response time, between two points on the internet network...
In 16 of the 21 years between 2003 and 2024, a state of emergency due to drought was declared in the city at least once...
Datacentres use vast amounts of energy and water to cool their supercomputers. Nevertheless, public authorities are greenlighting their construction in cities that have persistently suffered from drought. Caucaia is not an isolated case.
According to the Digital Disaster Atlas, five of the 22 datacentres planned are located in cities that have suffered recurring droughts and water shortages since 2003.
...[I]n February, the state government’s chief of staff, Chagas Vieira, confirmed in an interview with a local radio station that it was in talks with a Chinese company, and representatives from TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, have met senior government officials, including the vice-president and the development, industry, trade and services minister Geraldo Alckmin.
ByteDance has been approached for comment.
The company officially responsible for the project is Casa dos Ventos, a Brazilian wind energy provider that has invested in the datacentre sector. The company’s founder and president, Mario Araripe, announced last year that he aimed to attract a large global tech company, such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta or Microsoft, to fill the place with its computers.
Casa dos Ventos has already obtained one of the three necessary licences needed from the state of Ceará. According to the State Environmental Superintendence (Semace), the project received a licence for “water consumption of 30m³/day in a closed circuit, supplied by an artesian well”. Access to further details has been refused due to commercial confidentiality.
Casa dos Ventos says it is “committed to transforming Porto do Pecém into a technology innovation and energy transition complex” with “the largest datacentre and green hydrogen project in the country, which will use renewable energy”...
Ronildo Mastroianni, a technical director at Esplar, an NGO that has worked in Ceará for 50 years, says a project that requires intensive water consumption in a semi-arid region does not make sense. “A small push is all it takes to become arid,” he says...