Thai data center boom sparks fears of water shortage, air pollution

This story was produced in collaboration with the Environmental Reporting Collective (ERC). Read the ERC’s story on the impacts of data centers globally here.

CHONBURI, Thailand — The sun had yet to rise at 6 a.m., but Sarayuth Sonlacksa was already crouched on his wooden jetty, hoisting up plastic crates of crabs from his pond to see if any had reached the size needed to sell to restaurants in Bangkok.

He’s able to farm crabs this far inland, said Sarayuth, a former biochemist, thanks to the unique ecosystem provided by the mix of seawater, brackish water and freshwater that flows through the Bang Pakong River into the creeks near his home on the border between Chachoengsao and Chonburi provinces in eastern Thailand.

But that delicate balance, he fears, may be upended by a new data center being built in Chonburi’s Khlong Tamru subdistrict, 10 kilometers (6 miles) from his crab farm in Chachoengsao province. The facility is one of at least 19 data centers reportedly planned or under construction in Chonburi and neighboring Rayong province.

With the data centers springing up in an already heavily industrialized area that has struggled with water shortages and pollution, local residents say they fear the new sector could make the situation worse.

“For me, data centers are better than normal factories,” Sarayuth said. “But for sure they will result in more water conflict, with more competition for resources, and more wastewater.”

Thailand is experiencing a data center boom. In 2025 alone, Thailand’s Board of Investment reportedly approved 36 data center projects worth about $23 billion, followed by at least seven more facilities valued at $3.1 billion in January this year.

The country aims to have 1 gigawatt of data center capacity by 2027, up from roughly 0.35 GW in 2024, driven by growing AI demand abroad and at home. The number of Thai internet users who say they use AI daily doubled from 2024 to 2025, according to one survey.

Tech giants including Amazon, Google, TikTok and Microsoft are among those reportedly investing billions of dollars in data center projects across Thailand, which along with other Southeast Asian countries has introduced tax incentives and other policies to attract investment in the sector.

“Overall, the boom for Thailand has certainly happened very rapidly in the past year,” Jingwen Ong, research manager at market research firm DC Byte, told Mongabay in an email.

Drawing on public records and news coverage, Mongabay cataloged more than 70 data center projects in Thailand, with some 40 operational, around 20 under construction, and around 10 said to be in the planning phase.

Around two-thirds of the new facilities are set to be built in the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC), a special economic zone covering Chonburi, Rayong and Chachoengsao provinces southeast of Bangkok.

Established in the late 2010s during the military government run by Prayuth Chan-ocha, the EEC aimed to expand the region’s existing petrochemical, auto and electronics hubs while attracting next-generation industries like aerospace and robotics.

While those high-tech sectors largely failed to materialize, the EEC did see a wave of new recycling and waste-processing factories, especially after China banned waste imports in 2017. But as agricultural land was repurposed for industrial uses, farmers found themselves competing with large firms over dwindling water supplies. Developers have been accused of polluting the water, soil and air by illegally dumping toxic substances, discharging improperly treated wastewater, spilling oil and more.

Now some local residents fear these issues will intensify with the proliferation of data centers, which require massive amounts of water for cooling and electricity to process AI workloads and are not without pollution issues.

Those concerns are exacerbated by a lack of transparency. Local residents, government officials and activists interviewed by Mongabay during a recent trip to Chonburi and Rayong expressed frustration at the lack of publicly available information surrounding the new facilities’ resource consumption and questioned whether some had completed an environmental impact assessment, or EIA, as part of the permit process.

Nearly all of the data center developers Mongabay approached for comment declined to answer questions or didn’t respond to inquiries.

“Very few people know about these plans for the data centers,” said Chaweerat Phanprasirt, a veteran environmental activist who lives near the construction site of one data center in Chonburi.

“There’s been no consultation with the communities,” he added, referring to the sector as a whole. “We don’t get to know anything about the new investors or the government’s plans.”

Mongabay reached out to the Thai Data Center Association, the Board of Investment, the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, and the Eastern Economic Corridor Office, but none have offered comment.

Residents fear data centers could add to existing water woes

Mongabay identified at least 11 nascent data center projects in Chonburi, in addition to the four already operating there. The new ones include the one being built near crab farmer Sarayuth’s home: a 0.2-GW hyperscale facility in Khlong Tamru subdistrict, which would become one of the most powerful in the province.

Named QHI01, the facility is being developed by Bridge Data Centres (BDC), an arm of U.S.-based Bain Capital. The firm says it has secured $2.8 billion in bank financing to build new data centers across Thailand, Malaysia and beyond.

To supply QHI01 with water, BDC says it has signed a 10-year agreement with Thailand’s Eastwater Stecon Utilities Co., Ltd., (EWS), a joint venture between private water utility East Water and a subsidiary of engineering firm Stecon Group. The agreement will see EWS supply the data center with 3.3 million cubic meters (872 million gallons) of water per year, or about 9,000 m3 (2.4 million gal) a day — equivalent to the annual water consumption of 36,900 local residents, according to Mongabay’s calculations based on figures from a 2024 study on water in the EEC area.

Subcontractors building a pump station to connect EWS’s new pipelines to the data center told Mongabay onsite that actual demand would be a third higher — around 12,000 m3 (3.2 million gal) per day, or 4.38 million m3 (1.16 billion gal) annually. Neither East Water nor BDC provided answers to written questions by the time this story was published.

East Water’s website notes that parts of Chonburi province already face “ever-increasing water scarcity” affecting agriculture, households and industry, echoing concerns voiced by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and university researchers as well as NGOs and farmers. Thai authorities have warned of nationwide droughts this year amid concerns another El Niño event could further strain water-stressed provinces.

Industry boosters have touted the benefits they say the data centers will bring to Thailand’s economy, such as high-skilled tech jobs and economic growth.

Opposite the skeletal form of the QHI01 construction site, however, the local subdistrict chief told Mongabay he expected few benefits to accrue to the local community as a result of the project, about which little, he said, is currently known.

“There’s been no survey asking the community about the data center or its water consumption,” said Pudit Thamphayun, the head of Khlong Tamru subdistrict. “As far as I know, there’s no [environmental impact assessment], and as head of the subdistrict, these things all pass through me — I’ve not seen it.”

Somnuck Jongmeewasin, research director at EEC Watch, an NGO, says the development of the EEC as a whole should have been accompanied by a strategic environmental assessment. While EIAs are carried out for individual projects, a strategic environmental assessment would take into account the broader impacts of large-scale development programs like the EEC.

“The EEC policy started in the wrong direction,” Somnuck said. “There was no strategic environmental assessment, so we don’t even know [whether the resources are available].”

In 2022, the Thai government’s Office of Water Resource Management reported total water demand in the EEC at 658 million cubic meters (174 billion gallons), including 309 million m3 (82 billion gallons) for industry, 217 million m3 (57 billion gallons) for household use, and 132 million m3 (35 billion gallons) for agriculture.

A study published in February 2024, before the current data center boom, projected demand would rise to 800 million m3 (211 billion gallons) by 2027 and reach 1 billion m3 (264 billion gallons) by 2036.

“The industrial areas always win,” said Sarayuth, the crab farmer. The arrival of data centers in an area where agricultural communities and industrial estates already compete for water, he said, will only exacerbate conflict.

One flashpoint is Chonburi’s Khlong Luang reservoir, where fishers say catches have fallen in recent years as water levels have dropped.

Much of the reservoir’s water is piped to Chonburi’s Ban Bueng district, where authorities sell it to industrial estates and households. East Water says it has nearly finished building a pipeline to source water from the reservoir, in part to accommodate demand in the EEC.

“The reservoir will dry out quicker if more water is taken from it, because Khlong Luang isn’t very deep,” Saweng Samang, a local fisher who has spent much of her life on the reservoir’s waters, told Mongabay.

Farmers say water supplies across the EEC are increasingly earmarked for industry and urban use, and that they must fend for themselves through longer, drier summers.

Watcharat Pung, a representative from the opposition People’s Party for Rayong’s Ban Chang district, said the data center boom has laid bare deep inequalities. “The data centers need a lot of water, yet regular people have no running tap water,” he said in an interview. “They [data centers] get land titles when most residents here can’t get one.”

The vast majority of companies reportedly building data centers in Chonburi and Rayong, including China’s Haoyang Data, Amazon, DayOne and TikTok, did not reply to requests for comment.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the company is building a data center in Chonburi, but declined to disclose its exact location, citing security concerns. Google also declined to answer questions about the capacity and projected water consumption of its data centers in Thailand on confidentiality grounds. The spokesperson said that once operational, the Chonburi facility would support about 100 jobs.

In response to concerns about water stress in Chonburi, Google said it would take “a granular look at the local conditions to determine the right cooling approach,” without offering specifics.

The spokesperson added that Google had conducted an environmental impact assessment for its Chonburi data center but declined to share the findings.

‘It’s already broken’

Wastewater presents another unknown. Locals interviewed by Mongabay expressed concern over the lack of public information on not just how much water new data centers will consume but also how they will treat and dispose of water used for cooling.

Sarayuth, the biochemist turned crab farmer, said water used to cool data centers’ graphics processing units, or GPUs, is typically treated with chemicals to prevent the buildup of calcium carbonate, calcium sulfate and bacteria on the high-tech processors.

“Usually, you’d mix chlorine into the water to prevent scaling on the GPUs, and chlorine kills everything,” he said.

Observers of the sector have written that data center wastewater can contain biocides — a chemical designed to prevent the growth of bacteria, mold and algae — such as chlorine dioxide and bromine, as well as nonoxidizing agents like isothiazolin and glutaraldehyde, and corrosion inhibitors such as organic acids and phosphates that prevent rusting or decaying.

Even when discharged at low concentrations, the sheer volume of wastewater generated by some data centers can pose pollution risks once it’s released back into waterways used by farmers and fishers.

Wastewater handling varies by facility. Many of the new Thai data centers are being built inside industrial estates with centralized treatment systems, but the situation is less clear for standalone facilities like BDC’s QHI01 in Chonburi. The data center is being built next to the Khlong Tamru canal, through which pollution from the industrial areas flows into the Gulf of Thailand.

“We can still get some fish, but it’s not enough to pay for our families,” said Sengchan Supalat, a fisher in his 60s whose family has been fishing in the canal and its interconnected waterways for generations. “In the past, there were a lot of fish in the canals across Chonburi, but after the industrialization, the numbers dropped.”

Farther south, in Rayong province, Thailand’s petrochemical capital, the sea’s blue sheen has long masked the volume of poorly treated industrial wastewater and raw sewage discharged into coastal waters.

With billions of dollars set to flow into at least eight new data centers in Rayong, including Galaxy Data Center’s planned 1-GW facility, Haoyang Data’s 0.3-GW site, ZData Technologies’ 0.2-GW project and a pair of facilities totaling 0.05 GW by K2 Strategic, the province is poised for a new wave of water-intensive development. Rayong is already home to at least three data centers, including two run by Amazon and one by Planet Communications Asia.

None of these companies appears to have published information on water consumption, and none responded to Mongabay’s emailed questions, making it difficult to gauge the sector’s impact on the EEC’s water systems.

Sakol Thungsub, manager of the provincial waterworks authority’s branch in Rayong’s Ban Chang district, said the agency isn’t concerned about water shortages due to added demand from the new data centers.

In an interview at his office in December, Sakol said the district’s five water production stations, supplied by multiple reservoirs, can produce up to 151,200 m3 (40 million gal) of treated water per day. Average daily consumption currently stands at about 120,000 m3 (32 million gal), leaving a daily buffer of more than 30,000 m3 (8 million gal).

That buffer, he said, will be enough to supply a pair of data centers in the Silicon Tech Park, a large industrial development in Ban Chang district that bills itself as “Southeast Asia’s premier Data Center Valley.”

According to Sakol, combined water demand from the two data centers will eventually rise to between 19,600 and 28,600 m3 (5.2 million and 7.6 million gal) per day. The agency can request an additional quota from the Royal Irrigation Department, which manages the reservoirs the agency sources from, should demand exceed the 151,200 m3 capacity, he said.

One of the data centers is Galaxy Data Center’s planned 1-GW “hyperscale” facility. A spokesperson for Hoyinn Technologies, which owns Galaxy, declined to answer questions sent by Mongabay but said their operations fully complied with local regulations.

Fossil fuel likely to power data centers

Thailand’s data center boom also risks locking the country into deeper fossil fuel dependence as electricity demand surges.

Despite government targets to reach 68% renewable energy by 2040, Thailand’s grid remains overwhelmingly fossil-fueled. Renewables accounted for just 15% of the energy mix in 2024, while fossil fuels such as natural gas accounted for 68.3% and coal 16.7%.

Peter Ford, a regional energy and climate consultant, says it was reasonable to expect that many of the new data centers would be powered by gas.

“If we assume that the data centres will increase national electricity demand at a far quicker rate than the last power development plan projected, then given Thailand’s existing fossil gas infrastructure and lack of support for solar and wind, we can assume much of the energy growth will also come from gas,” Ford wrote in a message.

Global brands, he said, will likely use offsets like international renewable energy certificates or virtual power purchase agreements to compensate for their use of fossil fuel-based energy in Thailand, essentially paying for renewables elsewhere rather than using them directly.

Google said it would seek to buy clean energy from yet-to-be-constructed power projects in Thailand, while purchasing carbon removal credits to address residual emissions.

“The water competition is one thing, but the indirect impact that we’ll all feel is the electricity demand,” said Sarayuth, the biochemist turned crab farmer. “The government will try to increase production capacity, but this will increase the levels of CO2 and PM2.5 emitted from burning fuel, so I don’t see any benefits for people living near data centers.

“You have to understand, this is my home and I’m telling you, it’s already broken,” he said. “It can’t get much worse here.”

Banner image: The construction site of Bridge Data Centre’s 0.2 GW QHI01 data center in Khlong Tamru subdistrict, Chonburi province, Thailand as seen in December 2025. Photo by Andy Ball for Mongabay.

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Philip Jacobson Editor

This story first appeared on Mongabay

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