CLIMATE journalists investigating technology companies should stop chasing industry narratives about “green AI” and focus instead on the massive physical infrastructure and resource extraction fuelling the sector’s expansion, experts warned at a landmark journalism conference in Malaysia last month.
At the 2025 Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC25) held on November 20-24 in Kuala Lumpur, two dozen veteran investigative reporters and forensic experts from five continents delivered a clear message: the real climate story in tech isn’t about carbon pledges or efficiency gains — it’s about power, water, and the communities bearing the environmental costs.
The Hidden Environmental Toll
“These technologies don’t exist in some intangible cloud,” one speaker emphasised during the day-long workshop on technology journalism. “They are deeply embedded in the physical world — massive networks of energy- and water-intensive data centres, mining operations for rare earth minerals, and supply chains that span continents.”
The workshop highlighted how tech companies have successfully controlled public narratives around their environmental impact, obscuring the resource demands of artificial intelligence and cloud computing infrastructure. As AI systems proliferate globally, their appetite for electricity and water is colliding with communities already facing climate-driven scarcity.
Real-World Climate Impacts
The workshop highlighted stark examples of AI infrastructure colliding with climate-stressed communities. In Chile, activists spent years resisting Google’s plan to build a data centre that would have tapped into one of the country’s few remaining public water sources — in a nation experiencing its 15th consecutive year of unprecedented drought.
“Chile has an interesting history in that it was under a dictatorship for a very long time. And so, during that time, most public resources were privatised, including water,” Hao explained in a subsequent interview about her reporting. “But because of an anomaly, there’s one community in the greater Santiago metropolitan region that actually still has access to a public freshwater resource that services both that community, and the rest of the country in emergency situations.”
That’s where Google wanted to build its data centre, tapping into freshwater to cool servers. Community activists fought for years to stop the project, Hao documented in her book, facing language barriers when Google sent English-speaking representatives to address Spanish-speaking residents. The project was eventually halted after a court ordered the company to reconsider climate change impacts on the aquifer.
Meanwhile, a McKinsey report found that in the next five years, based on current AI infrastructure expansion, the industry would need as much energy on the global grid as two to six times California’s annual consumption, mostly serviced by fossil fuels. Coal plants scheduled for retirement are having their lifespans extended to power data centres.
Challenging the “Neutral Technology” Myth
Karen Hao, author of “Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race For Total Domination” and one of the world’s leading AI watchdogs, stressed that journalists must challenge the notion that technology is neutral or inevitable.
“I think the central pillar of [big tech] is narrative: the ability to control, and shape the narrative that allows them to continue expanding and gaining unfettered access to resources,” Hao told attendees at the pre-conference technology journalism workshop. “In terms of the most important investigative priorities, I think that’s to centre power as the lens through which you examine tech, because there is a really, really tiny group of people making extraordinarily profound decisions that will have ripple effects on supply chains; on the environment; communities all around the world.”
Hao, who leads the Pulitzer Centre’s AI Spotlight Series and was formerly a senior editor at MIT Technology Review, documented the environmental impacts of AI infrastructure for her New York Times bestselling book, travelling from data centres in Chile to data labelling operations in Kenya.
Natalia Viana, co-founder and executive director of Agência Pública, Brazil’s first nonprofit investigative journalism agency and one of Latin America’s largest newsrooms, reinforced this point. “Many journalists think covering big tech is about covering tech — but it should be about investigating the people who make the decisions behind the algorithms and the market bubbles,” Viana said. “These are the most powerful companies in history — and their products affect every aspect of our lives and democracies. It’s a huge power imbalance. They are very hierarchical — a handful of mostly men, and their tactics are reproduced everywhere.”
Viana, who won the 2025 Maria Moors Cabot Prize Gold Medal from Columbia Journalism School for her investigative work on human rights and government accountability, emphasised that journalists must focus on exposing the decision-makers behind tech expansion, not just the technologies themselves.
What Climate Reporters Should Investigate
The conference, which drew more than 1,500 journalists to the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, outlined several investigative priorities for climate-focused technology reporting:
Follow the physical footprint. Map the locations of data centres, their energy sources, water consumption rates, and grid impacts. Demand transparency from local governments about resource allocation agreements.
Track the supply chain. Investigate mining operations for lithium, cobalt, and rare earth minerals essential to tech hardware. Document labour abuses and environmental damage in extraction zones, often concentrated in developing nations. In Chile’s Atacama Desert, for instance, lithium extraction for batteries is already straining water resources before data centres arrive.
Challenge green claims. Scrutinise corporate sustainability reports and carbon offset programs. Ask whether renewable energy purchases actually reduce emissions or simply shift them elsewhere.
Centre affected communities. Amplify voices from regions bearing environmental costs — from water-stressed areas hosting data centers to mining communities facing contamination. As one African data journalist at the workshop noted, “Tech systems are entrenching systemic injustice in the Global South. We need to help communities understand how these decisions affect them.”
Examine the power structure. As Viana emphasised, focus on the small group of decision-makers steering these trillion-dollar corporations and their outsized influence over climate policy and resource allocation.
Tools and Methods
Conference panellists acknowledged that AI tools themselves could help investigations when used carefully and fact-checked rigorously. Large language models can identify patterns in corporate filings, environmental permits, and energy usage data that might otherwise remain buried. The investigative journalism community should create its own AI tools to boost efficiency, one veteran editor suggested, noting that with fewer than 10,000 full-time investigative reporters worldwide, the field desperately needs technological leverage.
However, speakers cautioned against Silicon Valley’s narrative that AI represents a climate solution. “They position it as ‘an everything machine’ that can tackle any problem, anywhere in the world,” one speaker noted. “But investigative reporters have shown how these systems fail, particularly outside wealthy English-speaking markets.”
A Global Justice Issue
Throughout the day, speakers emphasised how technology’s environmental impact intersects with growing authoritarianism and inequality. The same infrastructure boom threatening water and energy security is also enabling surveillance systems that target climate activists and environmental defenders. One leading forensic investigator revealed that a second boom in cyber surveillance of journalists and dissidents — including zero-click spyware that quietly turns phones into surveillance tools — was imminent.
The workshop also highlighted chilling cases from recent investigations: female Ukrainian journalists whose identities were stolen for AI-generated Russian propaganda deepfake videos that attracted 24 million views; the Mexican army secretly surveilling human rights activists; and Israel’s military using machine learning to generate hundreds of new targets with lethal consequences for civilians in Gaza.
One African data journalist reminded colleagues: “Tech systems are entrenching systemic injustice in the Global South. We need to help communities understand how these decisions affect them — because ‘algorithm’ doesn’t even exist in many mother tongues.”
The invitation-only workshop, titled “The Investigative Agenda for Technology Journalism,” was held under Chatham House Rule to encourage candid discussion, with speakers’ identities disclosed only with their permission. The conference continues the Global Investigative Journalism Network’s mission of strengthening watchdog reporting worldwide, with GIJC25 marking its first Asia gathering. Previous conferences have been held in Gothenburg, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, and other cities.
For climate journalists, the message was unequivocal: stop being dazzled by tech industry promises. Instead, follow the power lines, trace the water pipes, and investigate the human choices accelerating both AI expansion and environmental crisis.
As Hao concluded, these stories require going “where the processes are lit differently” — standing by mine gates, substations, and reservoirs rather than in keynote halls.
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