MANILA, Philippines – This year’s Earth Day frames environmental protection as a collective choice. But in the tech sector, sustainability goes beyond policy.
Wendy Koh, Asia Pacific vice president of data infrastructure firm Hitachi Vantara, said AI’s environmental impact is no longer confined to the initial phases of model training.
As AI embeds itself into everyday business operations, its energy consumption continues to surge..
“Efficiency at every layer — from data storage to workload optimization — is not just a technical consideration, but a strategic one,” she said.
Global data center electricity consumption is projected to approach nearly 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2030, the International Energy Agency said.
In regions where energy, land, and cooling capacities are increasingly constrained, the environmental cost of rapid digital expansion is becoming harder to ignore.
RELATED: Ditching copper for light: How photonics could fix AI's alarming climate footprint
While global tech players reckon with AI’s massive energy footprint, the Philippines finds itself navigating a different yet overlapping crisis.
The Philippines recently joined Pax Silica, a United States-led initiative aimed at securing semiconductor supply chains for advanced AI. Manila will host an “economic security” zone in the Luzon Economic Corridor sized over 1,619 hectares, the US State Department said in a press note.
But environmental advocates argue the deal masks a geopolitical agenda under the guise of development.
Center for Environmental Concerns executive director Lia Mai Torres told Fyt it subordinates the country to a new “economic security order” that seeks to control the foundations of emerging technologies.
Pax Silica is a 13-country coalition designed to accelerate high-tech manufacturing and reduce American dependence on China for critical minerals. It focuses on securing AI and global supply chain networks.
With the Luzon site standing as the coalition’s first AI-native industrial acceleration hub, the initiative aims to anchor strategic control over AI infrastructure and supply chain, the US Department noted.
The US will occupy the Luzon site rent-free and administer it as a special economic zone with diplomatic immunity, the Wall Street Journal reported. The hub will effectively operate under US common law.
Torres noted this arrangement raises serious concerns about accountability and the erosion of national jurisdiction. By invoking “Pax”, a supposed era of stability, the US is asserting Western dominance over the global tech supply chain, she added.
“The Philippine government should have known better than to enter into yet another deal with the United States, a country that continues to drive militarization and geopolitical tension in the region,” she said.
The hub operates alongside a critical minerals memorandum of understanding signed between the two countries in February.
While the government touts “Filipino-led” processing of critical minerals and rare earths, the technology, financing, and ownership structures remain largely foreign-driven, Torres explained.
She cited mechanisms like loans from the US Export-Import Bank that dictate the flow of capital.
The Philippines risks entering a cycle where it extracts its own resources just to service foreign debt, while the actual value generated is exported abroad, Torres warned.
Mechanisms like enforceable price floors and tariff adjustments insulate Western investors from market risks, but lock resource-producing countries like the Philippines into unequal terms of trade.
The push to meet global AI demand comes at a steep ecological cost.
As heavy industry and logistics will be concentrated in one massive enclave, the planned hub could accelerate the degradation of local ecosystems.
Large-scale mining for nickel and other critical minerals means “clear-cut forests, denuded watersheds, silted and poisoned rivers,” Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment (PNE) stated.
Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) noted that Pax Silica will accelerate extraction in provinces like Zambales, Palawan, and Nueva Vizcaya.
Many of these areas are prime agricultural lands and biodiversity zones that sustain rice and coconut production. Converting them into industrial corridors directly threatens local food security, the group said.
“We will be made the supplier of cheap raw materials and low-value processing such as assembly, testing, and packaging, while they hold the technology, control, and profit,” KMP added.
Both groups pointed to the “toxic legacy” left behind by former US military bases in Clark and Subic, where soil and groundwater in these areas were contaminated by fuel, heavy metals, and solvents.
Inviting a vast new US-controlled hub clusters these facilities near vulnerable coasts and deliberately creates another generation of “toxic sacrifice zones,” Kalikasan PNE added.
The expansion of US military presence alongside these extractive projects historically leads to the militarization of mining areas, Torres noted. This results in the harassment, criminalization, and killing of environmental human rights defenders, she explained.
Aside from environmental and social costs, the nature of what these AI-native facilities produce is also under scrutiny.
Progressive groups argue the hub is fundamentally about “war production” masked as economic development. Semiconductors and advanced electronics power consumer goods, but they also equip missiles, surveillance drones, and militarized communications infrastructure.
By hosting an outpost explicitly designed to support US supply chains, the Philippines is being positioned to provide the tech requirements of a foreign war machine, the Makabayan bloc wrote in a joint statement.
US-funded artificial intelligence models like that of Palantir are already being used in military aggression across the world, the Computer Professionals’ Union (CPU) noted.
“The Marcos administration chooses to be complicit with the production of US war machines instead of developing technology for the people with our Filipino IT professionals,” the group added.
As Earth Day calls on the public to protect the planet, the Pax Silica initiative forces a critical reckoning on the true cost of development.
What is truly being secured: Filipino livelihoods and climate safety, or the resource base of foreign weapons manufacturers? – fyt.ph
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