The cloud follows us wherever we go. Like a companion, it constantly floats above our devices, ready to send data every time we scroll through Instagram, stream Netflix or consult Google Maps—whether at work, on the subway or at the base camp of Mount Everest.¹

Naturally, “the cloud” evokes the idea of a delicate, lightweight presence, constantly in flux, ephemeral, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Befogged by such connotations, it is easy to forget that its actual workings rely on a gigantic physical infrastructure. “The cloud” is a planetary-scaled material landscape, composed of infinite cables, routers, switches, and—at its core—data centers. Far from weightless, these monumental, warehouse-like buildings host endless rows of servers that store, process and share our data 24/7. This is the space behind our screens. Every time we call upon the services of our digital companion, we feed on a cascade of computational processes in a data center somewhere around the world, filled with the hum and heat of thousands of calculating machines (Yañez-Barnuevo, 2025). It’s only thanks to their spinning, reading, writing and rewriting at maximum speed that we can tap into the raging currents of texts, images, videos and apps that flow through the web day in day out.

Unsurprisingly, it takes gargantuan amounts of energy to run the cloud. U.S. data centers alone consume the electricity equivalent of 17 nuclear power plants today. The main drivers behind this enormous demand are the data-heavy operations of social media platforms, online apps, streaming services but also, and in particular, the exponential growth of artificial intelligence (AI). From AI-chatbots like ChatGPT, to AI-based image generators like Dall-E and the increasingly AI-saturated web product lineup of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon—they all rely on energy-intensive operations performed by data centers (Spencer, 2025, p. 55). In order to train and run their models, legions of high-performance computers digest trillions of data points behind featureless facades. The goal is to discover statistical patterns in vast amounts of numbers, texts and images that can then be used to generate new outputs. This includes more or less meaningful applications, such as climate predictions and medical diagnosis, as well as military targeting, deep fake propaganda videos and instructions on how to bake bread. And while the exact amount of electricity needed for specific AI-applications are mostly a well-kept industry secret², the baffling facts on the ground speak for themselves: those regions in the U.S., Singapore and Ireland that operate AI-ready data centers today are facing strained electricity grids already³. 

Nevertheless, the craving for energy has only just begun: exacerbated by an ongoing AI boom, the global electricity demand of data centers will more than double within a few years, reaching levels comparable to whole nations such as Japan (Spencer, 2025, p. 14). Worse, a large part of the required electricity still relies on fossil fuels. And although this dirty side of nondescript server racks “might be far less visible than the billowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations,” their environmental footprint is evidently significant, growing fast, as AI researcher Kate Crawford stresses (2021, p. 41). A text-book example, Google—AI giant and operator of dozens of data centers—confesses in its latest environmental report: “As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging” (2024, p. 31).

Welcome to the water castle
In need of cleaner energy sources and a stable electricity supply, data center operators decided to set foot on Swiss soil. Situated amidst the Alps, spectacular mountains and abundant water resources characterize the country; an oasis of streams, rivers, and lakes that traverse its steep slopes and rocky landscapes. The constant flows of water, fed by hundreds of glaciers, provide the perfect conditions for the mass production of hydropower, making Switzerland not only the “water castle of Europe” but also turning it into a seemingly “inexhaustible alpine battery” full of clean and cheap energy.

Attracted by these readily available hydro resources, data centers are mushrooming everywhere in Switzerland⁴. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all plugged into the Swiss landscape, and national and multi-national cloud suppliers set up shop too⁵.

Many of them highlight their sustainability certificates proudly on their websites telling us that their “data center is more than just a place for your data. It is a showcase project for environmental protection” (Stollen Lucerne Data Center, 2025). In parallel, pictures of green data clouds hovering over glaciers, lakes and waterfalls on their Instagram accounts promote “the highest sustainability standards.” Switzerland, then, the new eco-data castle of the world?

In fact, the story of Swiss “green energy” starts way earlier, amidst the Industrial Revolution. More than 150 years ago—at a time when Great Britain and other countries were filled with smoke and black clouds—Switzerland realized that hydropower was the country’s only way towards electrification and industrial progress. Lacking any fossil fuels, the Swiss capitalized on their topography and reengineered their watery landscapes to power the country: dams were erected, rivers channeled, and turbines installed. Driven by energy-hungry industries and growing towns, almost 90% of Switzerland’s electricity was water-based by 1970 (Dommann & Stadler, 2021, pp. 76–78). In the process, hundreds of hydropower plants were distributed all around the country, either harvesting the energy from flowing rivers directly (so-called run-of-river power plants) or storing rain- and meltwater behind the dam walls of reservoirs in order to generate electricity at specific times (so-called storage power plants). In many ways, those massive hydroelectric infrastructures drove forward Switzerland’s version of hydromodernity—a term coined by geographer Erik Swyngedouw that describes the operationalization of water flows to make landscapes productive and secure economic growth (Swyngedouw, 2015). Here, the “liquid power” of state-led water-management creates the promise of a continuous flow of energy, capable of powering profitable ventures and national progress.

Today, hydromodernity lives on in Switzerland: in the wake of the climate crisis and the country’s nuclear energy phase-out, waterpower is on the rise once more⁶. Understandably, data center operators are eager to utilize this seemingly clean and inexhaustible energy source for their operations.

In return, their AI-inflected visions give Switzerland’s hydromodern identity a major update: now, the country’s tamed and tightly controlled waters power not only chemical and metal industries of extra-human scale, but also the infinitely repeating stacks of servers that run up-and-coming AI superpowers.

With this invigorated self-conception as a hydromodern and future-ready nation, approvals for the construction of more data centers are granted, full speed ahead. And while more and more of these facilities tap into the Swiss grid, the consequences of their power-hungry calculations unfold upstream, where walls and waters clash beyond the timber line.

Anti-rivers and aquatic deserts
Without a doubt, Switzerland wouldn’t be the same without its hydropower hardware. The country has the highest density of reservoirs worldwide and hosts the staggering number of 188 large scale dams, including some record-breaking constructions ready to be featured in James Bond movies⁷. Many of those infrastructural monuments are located in alpine territories, have awe-inspiring walls higher than 100 meters, and store billions of liters of rain- and meltwater in their colossal pools. When energy is required, gates are opened and some water is dashed down into titanic turbines that generate electricity. This way, almost half of Switzerland’s white gold is produced, guaranteeing a stable energy supply for citizens and industries alike.

Whereas this water-based electricity seems to be clean and without side effects at first glance, its environmental impacts are severe. That is because dams utterly alter the rivers they harness. By blocking their movements and dampening their dynamics, they turn them into what environmental scholar Lisa Blackmore calls “antitheses of rivers.” This is the opposite of a river left to its own devices, which usually “flows in different volumes and intensities, but always flows.” Thereby the seasonal variations in temperature, sunshine, rainfall and meltwater make “the fluctuating courses of rivers ‘rise and fall like a heartbeat’” (Flemming, 2017, pp. 37, 40). This heartbeat is what dam structures alter and stop” (Blackmore, 2020, p. 18).

The implications of these broken beats are profound. First of all, when dams are built, local communities are displaced and landscapes are literally cast in kilotons of concrete—a material responsible for “limestone mining, massive sand removal, release of harmful particles, rubble, and ruins” (Choplin, 2024, p. 71). Once in place, their impenetrably thick walls destroy habitats and biodiversity, fracture migratory routes of fish and block the movement of sediments and nutrients (Truffer et al., 2001, pp. 19–24). And if this wasn’t enough, the reservoirs lose valuable freshwater to evaporation and some of them even produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is emitted when underwater microbes feed on organic matter that accumulates at the bottom⁸.

Once Swiss authorities learned these few home truths, they decided to mitigate some of the ecological consequences of dams through a series of regulations. For instance, since 2011 fish ladders need to be built to circumvent barriers and deadly turbines; the downstream distribution of sediment is enforced to restore lost habitats; and flash floods are weakened to protect aquatic dwellers from being washed away. While certainly well-intended, only 10% of dam operators have implemented these mandatory infrastructures as of today. Others have had their remediation projects “in the pipeline” for over 15 years (Baumgartner et al., 2024, pp. 8–22). Furthermore, the vitally important residual flow waters—releasing some water from dams to keep river ecologies alive—are “among the least implemented measures in Swiss environmental law”⁹ since the 1990s (WWF, 2025). As a result of these delays, omissions and violations, many Swiss rivers are not only out of sync and in poor condition, but resemble aquatic desserts emptied of life.

Data dams
Facing the severe consequences of dam infrastructures, it’s evident that the environmental impact of hydropower is far from negligible¹⁰. Hence, thinking of water-based electricity solely in terms of “green,” “zero-emissions,” “clean” and therefore infinitely scalable, does not only uphold the paradigm of endless resource extractivism, but will get us into trouble in the long run.

Nevertheless, Swiss data center operators—who now consume significant amounts of the country’s energy—are branding themselves as eco-friendly enterprises driven by an abundance of “sustainable” waterpower. At the same time, any environmental externalities created by their exponentially growing data operations are swept under the table.

A case in point are hyperscalers, the latest version of data centers, which are the size of a football field and provide capacity for thousands of servers and future AI clients. Labelled as highly efficient, shining sustainability clouds, a crucial detail is omitted within the euphoric press releases: a single facility consumes as much electricity as a city¹¹ and its red-hot servers are cooled-down with immense amounts of evaporating freshwater¹². In order to generate the necessary “green energy,” the material geographies of alpine landscapes need to be reengineered, dammed, and damaged even more.

Apparently, Switzerland is willing to do so. In 2021, authorities have announced 15 new large-scale hydropower projects to cover its surging electricity demands. Many power plants, dams, and reservoirs will be enlarged or, for the first time in a quarter-century, built from scratch (Swissinfo, 2025). Not even the iconic Matterhorn will be spared from an 85-metre-high dam near its peak. In order to ensure a swift realization of these projects, Swiss authorities annulled the right of appeal for local nature conservation associations who could “throw a spanner in the works” (Swissinfo, 2025). In parallel, more hydrological surveys are initiated and hydropower megaprojects are proposed. Beyond doubt, Switzerland is in a hurry to expand its domestic electricity production. In the light of surging energy demands and geopolitical instabilities, a homemade and stable energy supply seems more critical than ever. Thus, the country unleashes its “liquid power” once again in order to secure state sovereignty and economic progress through brute force¹³.

As a result, an increasing number of data clouds hovers over Switzerland’s mountains. For their operators, complex processes connecting hydropower infrastructures and river ecologies are mainly irrelevant footnotes in the rush to allure investors, train AI-models or mine cryptocurrencies.

Especially, when data center owners rent out their computing power to globally operating third parties—which is the case for many so-called colocation data centers in Switzerland—alienation levels up. Attracted by strong government support and favorable tax policies, those enterprises create value but do not reinvest, let alone actively support the remediation measures necessitated by their voracious energy consumption (Arizton, 2025). Instead, they wax and wane if market fortunes change, certainly “before regulations, studies, or long-term impact assessments are able to grapple with the social, ecological, and material effects of them” (Lall et al., 2019, pp. 13–14). Nevertheless, their profitable data is carried by the energy of Swiss rivers. And in return, their energy-intensive calculations have a lasting effect on Switzerland’s waterscapes. Through this interdependence, new landscapes of hydromodernity emerge: currents of water interact with streams of data that generate flows of financial liquidity. In the end, this water-turned-capital is geographically re-allocated to other cities and states, drifting far away from its drained sites of production.

Cloud blackouts
On the horizon of those liquid landscapes, a problem is looming large though: the water castle is running dry. Driven by a warming climate, most of Switzerland’s 1,400 glaciers are expected to vanish by 2090. In the short run, meltwaters might increase stream flows, leading to even more dams and greater electricity production. But with much less water and changing peak flows coming from the alpine giants in the long run, power companies will be forced to adjust their output seasonally¹⁴. Experts predict that the decreasing water supplies will further heat up conflicts over Swiss water¹⁵, with farmers and energy companies on the frontlines, who both depend on vast amounts of the precious resource.

In a draining water castle, one question becomes urgent: who will be allowed to tap into the remaining energy flows, especially in times of scarcity? As it stands today, the Swiss data center industry doesn’t have to worry about any data droughts. Classified as “critical infrastructure,” their hyperscale facilities wouldn’t be affected by any electricity rationing.

Since they provide “essential services” for hospitals, public transport and communities, authorities are unlikely to take them off-grid (Massaro & Sitzel, 2025). However, a short glance at their portfolios reveals that services less essential for survival are run by hyperscalers too: car dealers, shopping platforms, generative AI tools. All of them are guaranteed a stable energy supply should water capacities hit all-time lows, whilst alpine farmers might be forced to quit their jobs, fish go extinct, and citizens have to sing the 2-minute shower song¹⁶. The reason for this prioritization is clear: data centers have become the pillars of the digital economy, they are not only needed for essential services, but also to generate big revenues. Some even say that data centers could become “the new banks of Switzerland,” with an unlimited power supply as part of the all-inclusive package (Lavoyer, 2019).

Perhaps there couldn’t be a better moment to challenge those power structures than in the upcoming years. For there is an old hydropower agreement in Switzerland known as Heimfall. The term alludes to the expiry of many contracts between communities and hydropower companies who bought the rights to utilize their local waters. These contracts, also known as “concessions,” were mostly negotiated during the heydays of hydromodernity in the 1950s and 1960s and set at 50 to 80 years. Since many of those contracts will expire soon, myriads of Swiss dams and power plants will be reverted from energy companies to local communities (Rigendinger, 2025). From there on, they can sell them to energy companies again or operate them on their own terms. If they want, they could even decommission and disassemble them in an act of hydropower anarchy.

Theoretically, this could be a golden opportunity to rethink where the flows of Swiss waterpower should be directed. Once back in their hands, local communities could ask not only hypothetically, but in very real-world terms: should all operations and companies have unlimited access to their waters?

Hydrocommons dreams
Approached more radically, this calculation could even question the current accounting for hydropower as a “sustainable resource” and demand a new relationship with the country’s flows of water. In doing so, one would need to deep dive into the sources, mouths and turbulences of Swiss rivers, go where water crashes down dams and propels turbines, where it floods habitats and sweeps along fish eggs. There, water would appear not as an abstract resource any longer, but as a mode of connection that flows through—and thereby interacts with—all forms of life. This is the idea of the hydrocommons. Coined by feminist thinker Astrida Neimanis, the concept looks at water as a vast conduit that links a multitude of watery bodies in mutual interdependence: geophysical, meteorological, animal, botanical, microbial, human and technological bodies; water flows through all of us (Neimanis, 2017, p. 2).

What if data centers were to be seen through the lens of the hydrocommons, where myriads of bodies of water are interconnected—from fish, insects, mammals, and microorganisms, to mountains, dams, humans, and servers?

Probably, a rather mind-bending view would unfold. All of a sudden, we might see links all too clearly that were hiding behind images of innocent white clouds for too long. We might see water evaporate as a large language model is trained. We might see bodies of algae glow when data centers let their hot water run off into lakes. We might see crayfish being flash flooded by energy-hungry, dam-triggering AI-movie productions. We might see tons of sediment spit out by servers responsible for AI-enhanced PDF summaries. And, as a result of these dramatically novel views, we might think of sanctioning the most energy-absorbing data center applications in a most radical version of a hydrocommons Heimfall. Or we might ask more pragmatically, in the words of Dutch data economist Alex de Vris: “does every process and company need to use AI, just because they can” (Kampann, 2025)?

“Don’t worry, no need to ask such questions!” We hear the soothing voices of the cloud industry already, immediately after the radical idea crossed our mind. Instead of changing business models, limiting electricity consumption, and introducing moratoria for certain AI-applications, they suggest making their facilities much more efficient in the near future. They assure us that algorithms will become smarter, models slimmer, the architecture and cooling of the cloud more sustainable. They say: “trust us, quantum computing will arrive soon,” and point emphatically towards a handful of energy-efficient AI models and data centers that seem to support their claims momentarily—like the Chinese large language model Deepseek or the Swiss supercomputer Alps (Kampann, 2025).

Indeed, these projects consume less electricity than other systems, but it is highly questionable if their promises can hold true in the long run. Because history shows just the opposite: if systems become more efficient, more energy will be needed, not less, known as Jevons paradox. Named after 19th century British economist William Stanley Jevons, it states that technological advancements, which make a resource more efficient to use, will invariably increase overall consumption of this resource, because more people will use it (Alcott, 2009, pp. 7–78). This was already true for the coal consumption of yesterday’s steam engines and still seems to be true for the electricity consumption of today’s data centers. Indeed, current data center hubs are proofing the paradox already: the rising electricity consumption rates of cloud facilities in Ireland, Singapore, China, or the U.S. are outpacing their energy savings (Spencer, 2025, pp. 54–65). In some areas, like Switzerland, their energy demands are almost doubling every five years, resulting in massive environmental damage (Kampann, 2025).

Still, the damage done is hard to see. Because, unlike the dark, polluted skies of the Industrial Revolution, the image of the floating white cloud outshines its sizable amount of destruction and hides its dirty sides from view. The majority of Swiss data centers and their energy infrastructures are far removed from major population hubs, whether in the mountains or in semi-industrial exurbs, hidden behind facades of radical banality. By negating any expression of their own significance they contribute, as Kate Crawford writes, “to our sense of the cloud being out of sight and abstracted away, when in fact it is material, affecting the environment and climate in ways that are far from being fully recognized and accounted for” (Crawford, 2021, p. 46). It’s a vital alienation for all data center operators—and one which they must keep alive to keep their business running.

Nevertheless, this cloud is of the earth and its continuous growth requires expanding energy supplies, which come with devastating socio-ecological consequences. Thus, as companies race to build the energy-hungry infrastructures necessary for global AI supremacy, we urgently need to map its material traces and reveal the earthbound properties of their applications. Only this way, we can start to see who profits, pays or suffers from the increasingly cloudified Swiss skies. But in order to do so, we have to get away from the rhetorical promise of the cloud as a clean and weightless companion and see it as what it is: a heavy infrastructural network whose operations produce “deep, material marks” in geological formations and hydrological cycles, which affect the livelihoods of rivers, animals, plants, and citizens (Lall et al., 2019, p. 2). Only if we understand the cloud as part of such wider socio-natural configurations, can we ask emphatically if data centers should really have access to an unlimited amount of energy and if all of their operations are indispensable for society. Or asked differently, how much water is an AI-generated cat meme worth?

This text was written within the framework of xyz. It has been first published on the platform «xxx» in 2025. Learn more about xxx here.

About the author: learn more about the authors here

Header image: Columns of steam emerge from the cooling towers of Google’s hyper data center in The Dalles, Oregon, United States, © Google.

Footnotes
1
The company Everest Link provides high-speed internet in the remote Everest Region since 2014, which enables users to interact with cloud services. https://everestlink.com.np/, accessed on May 10, 2025.

2
One assessment suggests that data centers running ChaptGPT consumed as much energy as a small city as early as mid-2023. According to Sajjad Moazeni from the University of Washington all queries made on ChatGPT can cost around 1 GWh each day as of mid-2023, which is the equivalent of the daily energy consumption for about 33,000 U.S. households. https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/07/27/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use/

3  
For example, Singapore has introduced a three-year long data center ban in 2019 because the facilities consumed too much electricity and water. Meanwhile, in 2024, Irish data centers run by Amazon Web Services have restricted the number of resources users can access amid ongoing concerns about the amount of power consumed by the nation’s data centers. See https://time.com/6987773/ai-data-centers-energy-usage-climate-change/, accessed on June 1, 2025

4 
According to Cloudscene market data, Switzerland has currently 121 data centers. See https://cloudscene.com/market/data-centers-in-switzerland/all, accessed on May 10, 2025.

5
According to Arizton market reports, the country is emerging as a leading data center hub in Western Europe. Next to its secure and sustainable power supply, this is due to its politically stable environment, the central position within Europe and its reputation for technical innovation and low taxes. See: https://www.arizton.com/market-reports/switzerland-data-center-market-size-analysis accessed on June 1, accessed June 1, 2025.

6 
In 2025, waterpower provides approximately 60% of the country’s electricity (the number dropped from 90% after nuclear power was introduced in the late 1960s). Most likely, this number is going to increase in the upcoming years after the Swiss voted for a nuclear power phase-out in the shadows of the 2011 Fukushima accident. The increase in hydropower production is part of Switzerland’s so-called Energy Strategy 2050, which should maintain the country’s high supply standard through a combination of renewable energies (water, wind, solar, biomass) and reduce its energy-related environmental impact. See https://www.bfe.admin.ch/bfe/en/home/supply/renewable-energy/hydropower.html/, accessed on June 9, 2025.

7 
That’s no metaphor, the 220-meter-high Verzasca dam, located in the South of Switzerland, was used for a stunt in the opening scene of the 1995 James Bond movie GoldenEye.

8 
In Switzerland, this is especially true for low-lying dams, which accumulate organic matter in their reservoirs. Dams in higher altitudes collect mainly glacial sediment. See: Arushi Arora: “Dams: Economic Assets or Ecological Liabilities?” https://earth.org/dams-economic-assets-or-ecological-liabilities/, accessed on May 10, 2025.

9 
The legally implemented residual water flow through dams was reduced to the absolute minimum in 2022 in order to increase the amount of water available for energy production. https://www.bafu.admin.ch/bafu/de/home/themen/wasser/aufwertung-und-schutz-der-gewaesser/restwasser.html, accessed May 10, 2025.

10 
Just to make this clear: hydropower is still ecologically less harmful than powering a data center by burning good old fossil fuels. See for example: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy, accessed on May 12, 2025.

11 
For example, a new DigitalRealty data center close to Zurich will use as much electricity as 48,000 households, which corresponds to the consumption of the Swiss city of Winterthur. Diego Ortiz Yepes: “Wolkenbildung: Die Schweiz als neuer Hotspot für Datenzentren” (Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, 2021), https://news.hslu.ch/datenzentren-boom/, accessed May 10, 2025.

12 
Quite a few data centers in Switzerland are located on higher altitudes, which allows for open-air cooling systems that don’t rely on freshwater. However, many centers are located in less elevated areas too and still need to be cooled by water, especially when temperatures rise during summer. According to current research, training an AI model like Microsoft’s GPT-3 can directly evaporate 700,000 liters of clean freshwater. See https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271, accessed on May 10, 2025.

13 
However, Axpo, Switzerland’s biggest renewable energy producer, states that even these efforts won’t be enough, “by a long way.” To guarantee electricity supply, six times more energy is needed than what these projects would offer.

14 
Henry Fountain: “Where Glaciers Melt Away, Switzerland Sees Opportunity,” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/17/climate/switzerland-glaciers-climate-change.html, accessed on May 10, 2025.

15
For example, in 2023, the canton Thurgau has prohibited the withdrawal of water from its rivers and in 2022, the town of Courtételle restricted the irrigation of lawns because of water shortages.

16
In 2018, Cape Town, the first major city on earth to be faced with running out of water, has devised a song that lasts only two minutes and should help people save water by taking shorter showers. https://www.npr.org/2018/09/07/644918801/singing-in-the-shower-to-help-save-cape-towns-water, accessed on May 10, 2025.


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