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India’s data centre push runs into farmers’ resistance
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
India is aggressively courting US big tech to set up data centres in the country. But this push is colliding with a very different reality on the ground.
In February, the Indian government announced a 20-year tax holiday for foreign cloud service companies using India-based data centres to serve global customers. The move is aimed at positioning India as a global hub for artificial intelligence infrastructure, and encouraging companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to boost their commitments.
However, their existing data center projects in the country are running into roadblocks.
Google and Microsoft are both facing pushback from farmers against their data centres under construction in India. Farmers have said they are being pressured to give up land even as protests continue. Local activists warn that the same policies driving investment are also limiting farmers’ ability to resist.
“The union government and several state governments are solely looking at this as an investment issue, rather than a political-economy concern,” Indumugi C, a lawyer associated with digital rights organization Internet Freedom Foundation, told Rest of World. In March 2026, Indumugi authored a factsheet that highlighted the shortcomings of Indian regulators in creating clear policies about setting up data centres.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are each developing at least one big multibillion-dollar data centre project in India. Meta is reportedly in talks with Indian conglomerate Adani Group to build its own facility.
Google’s $15 billion data centre project in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh has come under fire for environmental, energy, and water concerns. Local activists have been protesting against the facility that is proposed in a primarily agricultural area known for its paddy fields and mango orchards.
“The proposed sites for the data-centre campus have been earmarked through opaque land-pooling and acquisition mechanisms, shrouded in secrecy and devoid of transparency,” activist group Human Rights Forum wrote in a blog post last October. The forum also raised concerns about the government’s “extraordinarily generous package” of incentives to Google, including tax exemptions, land allocation, discounted tariffs, reimbursements for water, power, and infrastructure amounting to Rs 22,002 crore ($2.4 billion) over 20 years.
“Such corporate giveaways divert scarce public resources away from essential sectors like healthcare, education, and rural development, thereby undermining the right to equitable development,” Human Rights Forum said.
In 2024, Rest of World reported that Microsoft was facing allegations of encroachment and industrial waste dumping at its data centre site in Telangana. Not much has changed since then, Arpita Kanjilal, head of the research and communications division at New Delhi-based nonprofit Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), told Rest of World.
Since August 2025, Kanjilal has led an investigation at Microsoft and Amazon’s data centres in Telangana, which found that farmers and local self-governance bodies established to promote democracy and decentralised planning at the village level were kept out of the loop when assigning land for data centres.
“Microsoft rejects allegations that it has encroached on any lake or engaged in improper waste disposal, and notes that the facility is not a manufacturing operation,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Rest of World. “The company is cooperating with the relevant authorities and will continue to address the matter through the appropriate legal process.”
Google, Amazon, and Meta did not respond to Rest of World’s questions about the farmer pushback in India.
India’s land acquisition rules include “public purpose” laws that allow the government to acquire private land for projects benefiting the public, such as developments related to national security, infrastructure, or urban development. These laws are now applicable to AI data centres, which the government has stated are key to development and job creation.
“All these public purpose laws are built on subsidies given to private companies. There are so many more hidden costs that we are still grappling to understand,” Kanjilal said.
Across the US, ongoing data centre projects of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have been stalled or cancelled due to such protests. In September 2025, Google withdrew plans for a massive $1 billion, 470-acre data centre in Indianapolis after local residents opposed the farm-to-data-centre transformation.
In January, Microsoft hit pause on its Michigan data centre plans to engage with the community first. The jury’s still out on court cases against Amazon’s data centres, delaying projects in at least three counties across Virginia, the data centre capital of the world.
In the Netherlands and Germany, too, residents fought off Microsoft and Google data centres, respectively, last year.
“US landowners, based on the circumstances, are given the opportunity to turn down a purchase offer. Unfortunately, landowners that I have worked with in India and Africa are not afforded the same right,” Jillian Hishaw, an attorney who fights improper farm seizures globally, told Rest of World.
The position of farmers in the US and the EU “is underpinned by robust property rights laws that treat land ownership as a fundamental and highly protected private right,” David Nagtzaam, a Portugal-based expert who helps organisations with AI transformation and governance, told Rest of World.
As of 2025, the US housed more than half of the world’s hyperscale data centres, which are typically around 930 square meters and consume more than one megawatt of power.
Like in India, the government in Spain speeds up authorisations and even expropriates lands for “interes generales,” or public interest. Aurora Gómez Delgado, the founder of the collective Tu Nube Seca Mi Río (Your Cloud Dries My River), is fighting against Meta’s data centre expansion in Talavera de la Reina. She encourages resistance groups worldwide to keep the pressure on American giants, since they’re the ones building at scale.
“It’s the same problem in all the world because there are the five same companies in all the world,” Gómez told Rest of World. “So the devil has the same faces for us.”
Ananya Bhattacharya is a reporter for Rest of World covering South Asia's tech scene. She is based in Mumbai, India.
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
Source: Scroll
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