Mexico’s datacentre industry is booming – but are more drought and blackouts the price communities must pay?

Many fear the arrival of tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the state of Querétaro will place too much of a strain on scarce water and electricity resources

In a nondescript building in an industrial park in central Mexico, cavernous rooms hold stack after stack of servers studded with blue lights, humming with computations and cooled by thousands of little fans and large vents blasting great columns of air across the room.

“Datacentres are the lungs of digital life,” says Amet Novillo, the managing director of Equinix Mexico, a digital infrastructure company, as he stands in the middle of the airflows that stop the hardware overheating.