Lawrence Summers, then chief economist of the World Bank, in a 1991 internal memorandum, suggested that the World Bank should encourage the relocation of dirty industries to less developed countries. This memorandum was leaked, and The Economist reported it on September 8, 1992. In this leaked memo, he suggested that ‘economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.’ The leaked memo faced strong criticism. David Harvey linked it with ‘toxic colonialism’ and ‘toxic imperialism,’ which is also linked with ‘cultural imperialism’. The cultural imperialism links that stigmatised ‘other’, and racially marked people with defilement and impurity. David Harvey, hence, suggested that Lawrence Summers’s “impeccable economic logic” was based on racial discrimination in which the logic of white supremacy expects that “trashy people can stomach trash”. We revisit Lawrence Summers’s heinous memo in a different context. A year ago, we wrote a piece on how Sam Altman’s statements on “changing the social contract” should be interpreted – and what this means for larger global society. Since then, things seem to have escalated, seemingly in multiple directions all at once. The capabilities of AI tools are now even more advanced than before, yet companies deploying AI tools in their workflows are realising they are not getting meaningful returns. Big Tech companies claim “AGI” is just around the corner, while AI is still deeply unprofitable. Meanwhile, as data centres have driven up electricity costs and depleted water supplies in already drought-prone areas, the United Nations has declared that our world has moved beyond an era of mere water crisis into near-irreversible “water bankruptcy”. There has been an increasing pushback from communities around the world against the construction of new data centres in recent times. Amid this turbulent period for the world as it reckons with the impacts of AI and climate change, India hosted the AI Impact Summit, the fourth in a series of summits across the world, notably the first to be held in a Global South country. In our article about the social contract, we emphasised the need for non-white and marginalised perspectives to push back against the exclusionary visions of the social contract being put forth by Silicon Valley CEOs. A Global South nation hosting a global AI summit would have been an ideal venue for showcasing such solidarities. However, the event seems to have largely been a showcase of geopolitical positioning and announcements of massive corporate investments, dressed up in the garb of sustainability and climate action rhetoric. This is a point of concern, given the ongoing developments in AI outlined earlier.AI data centres in the geography of precarity and unfreedomsIn the first place, massive corporate commitments of hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centres in India are worrisome, considering the volatility of the AI market and the excessive resource costs. These commitments also appear to be going completely against the event’s climate-conscious theme. The main argument for building data centres is ostensibly to make the country an “AI superpower”, with an expectation of massive job creation. However, multiple studies have established that data centres, in fact, create few jobs, with most such jobs existing only temporarily during the initial construction process.Representative image of artificial intelligence. Photo: Hanna Barakat & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.On the question of jobs, India’s layoff-plagued IT industry faces an existential threat from AI coding tools: are we helping build the infrastructure that will help wipe out one of our own core industries? Research also suggests that tax incentives for data centres do not deliver the promised economic benefits, even as India recently announced extended tax holidays of 20 years for data centres. Further, data centres are difficult to manage and maintain once built, as they are highly operationally demanding infrastructure. There are also cases where due to the nature of markets and shifting corporate strategies, data centres may be abandoned after being built. This is a concern, especially for local communities that have been deprived of their land and resources for these projects. The fear is that these AI data centres will be built around Dalit or Tribal Geographies, where people live the life of precarity. Shifting AI data centres to countries in the Global South has the same “impeccable economic logic” that Lawrence Summers suggested in his leaked memo. Judith Butler argued for an inclusive ethics to radically reimagine the concept of right to life in order to challenge the production of who does and who does not count as human. In India, due to the brutal caste system, Dalit bodies, communities, and their concerns are often overlooked. Hence, when billionaires such as Bill Gates call India a “laboratory to do things,” a logical question is: whose bodies and communities will be sacrificed to create human-lab conditions for these billionaires? The fear is that since these AI data centres are facing backlash in the Global North, they are trying to shift them to the Global South, where civil liberties are precarious and, furthermore, unaccountable, and repressive governments may go to any extent to protect the interests of these AI czars. It is thus likely that with AI as well, marginalised Indians might be now at the receiving end of Big Tech’s “laboratories”. Whether it is Sam Altman devaluing human life and experience by calling it the same as AI training data, or Anthropic building an identity around being the ethical and conscientious AI company while raising billions of dollars in funding, all Big Tech companies are operating within the same neo-colonial imaginaries. Data workers from the Global South are already tasked with sanitising AI datasets to clean them of violent, hateful, and disturbing content from the Internet, at the cost of their own mental health. Many reports have highlighted that people only take up these jobs due to a lack of better employment opportunities. Recent developments, therefore, must serve as a much more urgent reminder to understand the risks for the Global South. AI colonialism must be resisted, knowing fully well who will bear the cost of this new form of colonialism. Vijay K. Tiwari is an Assistant Professor (Law) at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. Kaif Siddiqui is a Research Fellow and Doctoral Scholar at the NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.