India, Feb. 10 -- The Union Budget has sent a strong signal to global technology firms - build your cloud infrastructure in India and you can operate tax-free until 2047. A 21-year tax holiday for foreign companies providing global cloud services through Indian data centres is among the most ambitious long-horizon incentives the country has ever offered. For hyperscalers and AI majors deciding where to anchor their next generation of compute, this degree of policy certainty is unusually attractive. Yet beneath the optimism lies a more difficult question that has received far less attention: How will all this computing be powered, and at what environmental cost?

Data centres are energy-intensive industrial facilities that operate continuo...