An Indigenous community is taking on TikTok after discovering the Chinese company planned to build a $10 billion data center in northeast Brazil.
Rest of World reported that the Anacé have filed a formal complaint against TikTok and are demanding that federal authorities stop it from developing a data center on their land.
Anacé leaders say that the government violated their rights by not consulting them about the project. They also say officials are ignoring concerns about the project's water requirements and its encroachment on areas with sacred cultural significance.
"They are putting it right next to the river," Cacique Roberto Ytaysaba Anacé explained.
Brazil is a leader in renewable energy, relying on hydropower to generate approximately 80% of its domestic electricity, according to the International Energy Agency.
This, along with its plentiful wind and sun in states like Ceará, has made Brazil an attractive destination for data center developers, as Rest of World notes, underscoring the ongoing progress toward cleaning up a highly polluting sector with massive energy demands. For its part, TikTok intended to power its project with wind from energy company Casa dos Ventos.
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However, communities are increasingly demonstrating how effective it can be to push back against unwanted projects. For instance, following public outcry, the city of Tucson, Arizona, rejected a proposal to build a data center reportedly backed by retail giant Amazon.
Rest of the World also pointed to a scrapped Meta data center in the Netherlands following a local campaign against the project, while Google halted plans for a data center in Chile after locals decried estimates that it would require more than 7 billion liters of water each year.
"In the past, they killed and expelled us," Ytaysaba said of historical encroachment on Indigenous lands to Rest of World. "[Now] they make us invisible."
Cynthia Picolo, executive director at the Laboratory of Public Policy and Internet — a civil society organization that co-signed the complaint — told the publication that the Anacé's fight "is an emblematic case of resistance and questioning of a big tech data center."
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"This experience will generate important precedents," Picolo said.
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