Abstract

The rapid expansion of hyperscale artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure is intensifying water stress and concentrating environmental harm in communities already made vulnerable by climate breakdown and racialised dispossession. Recent scholarship documents the volumetric scale of these water demands, which are rising steeply, and the conflicts they generate at particular sites. This article reads those demands across the AI supply chain as a single process, developing hydrosocial dispossession from water coloniality scholarship as a conjunctural analytic.

The concept names the process through which material water relations, governance authority and epistemic frameworks are reorganised simultaneously for computational demand generated elsewhere, severing communities and ecosystems from the hydrosocial systems that sustain them. The appropriation is place-bound and globally networked at once, as withdrawals from particular watersheds rise and fall with AI computation served worldwide.

Illustrative cases, from lithium extraction in the Atacama, semiconductor fabrication in Taiwan and electronic waste in Accra to data centre operations in the Colorado River Basin, Memphis and Santiago de Chile, show a shared logic of dispossession that travels through settler-colonial, postcolonial and developmentalist formations. Water functions as a primary, relational and multi-scalar medium through which digital capitalist expansion reproduces colonial-capitalist enclosure, and reading digital infrastructure through water extends digital political ecology towards questions critical water studies has long posed.

The article traces the resistance now unfolding, from community refusals and moratoria to Indigenous-led assertions of water sovereignty. Such interruptions contest the networked circuit at the sites where it must draw water, land and power. Water justice in the age of artificial intelligence thus begins with refusing the enclosures of computational extractivism.