Standing on the shores of Country, watching waves inch closer to ancestral lands, I witness a stark reality: Across the Pacific region, 16 nations face an existential collision between rising seas and Silicon Valley’s computational colonialism. From Tuvalu’s 11,400 people to Papua New Guinea’s 10.4 million, our communities confront unequal access to digital resources, with internet penetration ranging from 26.97% to 85.22%. While Tuvalu implements its “Future Now Project” to preserve culture and governance against territorial loss, the computational infrastructure of major tech companies consumes ever-increasing resources without accountability or recognition of Indigenous knowledge systems.
This technological colonialism has quantifiable costs. According to Australia’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources, “data centres currently represent 1-1.5% of electricity use globally,” with individual facilities consuming energy “equivalent to heating 50,000 homes for a year.” In Australia alone, data center energy consumption is projected to grow from 5% to potentially 15% of national energy use by 2030.
The water demands of this computational infrastructure are equally concerning. In locations where artificial intelligence (AI) facilities operate, they can consume up to 6% of district water supplies during peak periods. Colonial resource extraction patterns have implications. Pacifirc Island nations face critical water security issues due to climate change while AI companies construct facilities requiring millions of lites of water for cooling their systems.
Within this context, the AI safety movement’s claims require deep scrutiny. As Lazar and Nelson note in Science, “Big Tech, weary from bad publicity, is seizing the chance to be viewed as saviours from algorithmic harms, not perpetrators of them.” This “safety-washing” occurs while Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks are systematically excluded from global AI governance discussions.
AI’s impact on Oceania has broad computational reach
The computational costs of AI development are not theoretical. According to Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Catherine Foley, training a single model like GPT-3 requires “about 1½ thousand megawatt hours…the equivalent of watching about 1½ million hours of Netflix.” This consumption occurs while the full environmental costs remain hidden. As documented in Dr. Kate Crawford’s Senate submission, “the ‘full planetary costs of generative AI’ [are] ‘closely guarded corporate secrets.’”
Indigenous knowledge systems offer alternative frameworks for technology governance. This demonstrates how Indigenous-led initiatives can prioritize environmental and cultural sustainability in technological development. Frameworks can also recognize what Aboriginal knowledge holders have long understood—sustainable technological systems must be grounded in Country and community, not abstract notions of control.
The definitional vacuum at the heart of AI safety approaches becomes most evident in systems security. Constitutional AI attempts to encode behavioral constraints into systems without clear definitions of the behaviors being constrained. Through dadirri—deep, recursive listening—we observe the fundamental absurdity: How can you align or control something whose basic nature you cannot specify?
The tech industry’s response to these concerns often involves promises of efficiency gains. However, as the Senate Committee documents, “increased energy efficiency of AI may not lead to reductions in AI’s total energy use, where there is increased demand overall for AI services.” Investor Goldman Sachs confirms that despite efficiency improvements, “the widening use of AI will still imply an increase in the technology’s consumption of power.”
This is particularly evident in how environmental impact data is controlled—as the Senate Committee notes, “[t]he publicly available information in relation to the energy consumption, operating profiles and expansion plans of data centres are ‘somewhat opaque’ due to ‘commercial sensitivity.’” Meanwhile, Indigenous communities face immediate consequences. The Pacific Digital Economy Programme documents how Island nations must balance essential digital infrastructure needs against environmental sustainability, while the resource consumption of many technology companies continues unchecked.
