data centers they consume a lot of energy and, with the rise of AI, companies are looking for new places to locate their facilities. In Spain there are plans to open several of these data centers and Lleida was one of the points chosen for it.

However, and as reported from BEhave rejected the construction of two of these data centers. The reason given by your mayor? They were not going to contribute anything to the municipality.

“shoe boxes”. Fèlix Larrosa is the current mayor of Lleida, a municipality whose adjacent land was going to host the construction of two data centers. These facilities are equipped with rooms full of servers that are responsible for carrying out calculations and then uploading them to the network. The Internet or the aforementioned artificial intelligence, among other services, depend on these centers.

It is something that is booming and in which companies are investing a lot of money, but Larrosa believes that it is something that does not pay off. “They are shoe boxes, they don’t contribute anything to the local economy,” says the mayor.

They contribute little and consume a lot. According to the city council, the creation of jobs in the town would not compensate in the medium term and not only would they occupy a lot of industrial land, but they would also use an exaggerated amount of water. “The day you open the activity, there is a minimum maintenance staff. They need many square meters and the ability to generate a local impact is very limited,” he comments.

Larrosa goes on to state that “they do not attract people to work, especially with talent, and, in the end, they consume a lot of resources, such as water and energy.” This, precisely, is what has generated problems with the Meta data hypercenter in Talabera de la Reina and we have seen that countries like Chile has stopped giants like Google because the consumption of their data centers was going to be enormous.

Priorities. This water consumption thing is not an exaggeration and it is estimated that a 100-word email generated by AI, something that takes just a couple of seconds, consumes water equivalent to that of a bottle of water. And what kind of job do they want from the city council? E of companies that prioritize more traditional industries that create added value in the agri-food sector.

The mayor has stated that, although one of the two companies interested in setting up the data center purchased rural land for construction, that land will not be reclassified. And this intention to support the agri-food sector is something that fits perfectly with the statements from Larrosa just a few hours ago:

“Our city is the capital of one of the great agri-food epicenters of southern Europe and this is also our vocation and ambition. For years we have wanted to use capital, at the service of the progress of this sector. With entities like Mercolleida, which “I am honored to preside, and, for example, with the Parc Agrobiotech, which is launched to add the efforts of the technology sector to sustainability in the agri-food sector.”

Not everyone agrees. Obviously, there are those who think that this model will not work in their municipality and those who think the opposite. The president of Castilla La Mancha, Emiliano García Page, commented a few weeks ago that he was satisfied with the investment of 750 million euros that Meta will do for its data center in Talavera de la Reina. Precisely, although the drought could truncate the project, the company will install a system that will save 80% of the water used for cooling.

Other giants such as Amazon, IBM, Microsoft or Google have also shown their interest in Spain as a strong point of facilities of this type. Cerdanyola del Vallès is another Catalan town in which three have been installed in the last decade and there are another four planned and its councilor for urban planning, Eulàlia Mimó, declares in SER that “they are very important investments. In some cases, the processing centers of data are accompanied by training centers or innovation laboratories”.

And more importantly: from the city council they defend the opposite of what Larrosa comments: “on an economic scale we will collect the Construction, Facilities and Works Tax, the Real Estate Tax and the Economic Activity Tax”, so something would remain in the town.

Images | Jorge Franganillo, Manuel Geissinger