Hundreds of Protestors Bust Into Construction Site to Stop Microsoft Data Center
"This data center is gulping up our drinking water to make the rich even richer." The post Hundreds of Protestors Bust Into Construction Site to Stop Microsoft Data Center appeared first on Futurism .
On Friday, an estimated 100 activists from the climate justice group Geef Tegengas scaled the fences of an unfinished Microsoft data center campus in Amsterdam, disrupting construction efforts. The protest was part of a larger demonstration against the AI industry, attended by hundreds of demonstrators outside the site. One protester even managed to scale a massive construction crane, lighting smoke bombs and attaching a banner that read "fck AI."
The demonstration, organized by Geef Tegengas, a Rotterdam-based collective with a history of peaceful but confrontational protests against infrastructure related to fossil fuels and the military-industrial complex, aimed to protest Microsoft's involvement in the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the war on Iran, as well as the company's contribution to the production of AI-generated content.
Geef Tegengas spokesperson Roos Molenaar expressed outrage, stating that accepting the data center in Amsterdam would be accepting the creation of "AI slop" and the facilitation of genocide. She emphasized that the data center was consuming valuable drinking water, exacerbating the issue of inequality.
This protest follows a similar incident earlier this year when Extinction Rebellion activists, affiliated with the same group, hurled balloons filled with acetic acid at the walls of Microsoft's Amsterdam campus, symbolizing the deep-seated animosity towards data centers and the tech industry.
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