Tlalóc
AI needs water. Training large AI models requires vast amounts of data, which require data centres for storage, processing, and distribution. Data centres need fresh water for cooling, as their continuously running servers generate enormous heat. As it is an efficient heat-transfer agent, water is deployed through evaporative cooling. This water must necessarily be fresh or highly treated, so that any mineral or salt residue that may corrode and clog equipment can be avoided. Water is constantly drawn from local aquifers and watersheds, very often in regions that are experiencing water scarcity. This water is either returned degraded or not at all. Communities that are most affected by this extraction are rarely the ones that benefit from the AI systems it makes possible.
A principle that can help shape the governance of this technology and its relationship with water and natural resources comes from the Nahua (Aztec people), and their worship of Tlalóc, the God of Rain, Water, and Fertility.
Before proceeding, we want to name the fact that the ethics associated with Tlalóc emerge from a living religious and cosmological system, and not a philosophical tradition in the Western academic sense. We approach this with humility, with the awareness that Nahua knowledge systems were subjected to deliberate destruction during colonial conquest. What survives in written form reflects the filters of that destruction. Our offering in this archive draws on scholarly reconstructions and contemporary Indigenous scholarship, and we hold it lightly. We welcome correction from those who carry this tradition.
Understanding Tlalóc
Tlalóc, in Nahua cosmology, governs all the waters and the life they sustain, be that rainwater, rivers, lakes, or oceans. The ethics associated with Tlalóc are not about water as a resource alone, but reflect a deeper, more relational understanding of water as sacred. Nahua cosmology views water as a living presence with its own agency, claims, and role in the larger web of reciprocal relationships that sustain all life. Within this worldview, humans do not own water. Rather, they participate in a relationship with it.
This relationship is attentive to and carries obligations to offer gratitude, to use with care, and to ensure that all that is taken is appropriately returned and reciprocated. When reciprocity is broken, such as by treating water as a commodity to be extracted and sold instead of as a relation to be honoured, the consequences are not merely ecological, but also moral and cosmological. Mistreating, disrespecting, and extracting water results in a rupture in the fabric of relationships that hold the world together.
This relational understanding of and respect for natural elements, namely water, land, fire, and air, underlie a broader cosmological principle noting that the world runs on reciprocity, and that life is maintained and sustained by reciprocal relationships and exchanges between the human and non-human forces that sustain life. Within this framework, governance is more than the superficial management of human affairs, as it concerns itself with the maintenance of these relationships with the full community of beings making up the world.
What Tlalóc ethics unsettles in AI governance
Tlalóc invites governance to name the extraction of water exactly as it is: A violation of a reciprocal relationship and not merely an operational challenge that can be projectified. All the water that goes into sustaining a data centre is the water that sustains farming communities, the water that is essential for a river ecosystem, the water that helps put on our plates, and the water that meets the needs of surrounding flora and fauna. This water is meant to sustain current and future generations. Extracting it without reciprocity, acknowledgement, care, or return, and without the consent of the communities whose water it is to begin with, is a moral failure.
Tlalóc ethics also challenges the frameworks by which AI governance engages with natural systems. These frameworks treat natural systems as mere background conditions for human activity instead of as active and agentic participants in a web of relationships that have their own agency and integrity. Tlalóc invites governance to begin with a focus on the reciprocal obligations that are generated by the development of AI systems, to water, land, and communities present and future. At its heart, Tlalóc calls on governance to sit with the possibility that some of these obligations cannot be superficially discharged through carbon credits and water efficiency targets. It reminds us that what is owed goes beyond lip service and flattened metrics, to include acknowledgement, restraint, refusal, and a complete reimagination of what it means to take from the world without giving back.
References
Maffie, J. (2013). Aztec philosophy: Understanding a world in motion. University Press of Colorado.
Portilla, M. L. (1963). Aztec thought and culture: a study of the ancient Nahuatl mind (Vol. 67). University of Oklahoma Press.
Sahagún, B., Anderson, A. J., & Dibble, C. E. (1950). Florentine Codex General History of the Things of New Spain Fray Bernardino de Sahagún Translated from the Aztec Into English, with Notes and Illustrations by Arthur JO Anderson School of American Research Charles E. Dibble University of Utah In Thirteen Parts. School of American Research and The University of Utah Monographs of the School of American Research.
Whyte, K. P. (2018). Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(1-2), 224-242.
NOTE:
This article draws from the wisdom, practices, and life work of Indigenous groups. While educating ourselves on Indigenous worldviews is important, we understand that our actions can also contribute to and enable appropriation. As part of our ongoing attempts at practicing accountability, we invite readers to consider donating to Indigenous groups, collectives, organizations, or initiatives to support their lives and work.
