Tu Nube Seca Mi Río

Tu Nube Seca Mi Río — "Your cloud dries my river" — is a Spanish grassroots collective founded in 2024 to make visible the ecosocial impact of data centres, especially their water consumption. The collective was founded by Aurora Gómez, a psychologist with 25 years of free-software and digital-rights advocacy from Castilla-La Mancha, in response to Meta's announcement of a hyperscale data centre in Talavera de la Reina, Castilla-La Mancha — a historically dry region facing catastrophic desertification under climate change. The collective is the corpus's first Spanish grassroots local-group anchor and is the principal civil-society convener of joint alegaciones (formal legal objections) against the Microsoft, Amazon and Meta hyperscale facilities being sited across Spain's most water-stressed inland regions.

Founding and framing

The collective emerged from the discovery that Meta's planned Talavera complex would consume an extraordinary share of the municipality's drinking water; the company's original projection of 665.4 million litres of drinking water per year was later reduced 24% in revised plans after the collective's public pressure and litigation to obtain the underlying water-allocation data. The collective's stated mission is to "visibilizar el impacto medioambiental de los Centros de Datos, especialmente su consumo hídrico" — to make visible the environmental impact of data centres, especially their water consumption. Its name encodes the central political claim: the "cloud" is a techno-capitalist abstraction that obscures the material infrastructure of internet compute and the water it draws from real watersheds.

Gómez has articulated the underlying framing across two standing public lines: "They're using too much water. They're using too much energy" and "Neither people nor data can live without water. But human life is essential and data isn't" — the resource-priority articulation that anchors the collective's water-rights argument. Gómez has also located the siting pattern as deliberate: tech companies "target depopulated and ageing areas, where there is little or no opposition", tying the infrastructure decisions to a political-economy critique of which Spanish communities are made to host them. Her broader theoretical framing — that extractive technology "is not a design flaw, it's the design itself" — frames the work as a structural critique of the AI-infrastructure buildout rather than a project-by-project mitigation effort.

Aragón coalition alegaciones campaign

While the collective's founding case was Meta in Talavera de la Reina, its highest-visibility coalition work has been against the hyperscale buildout in Aragón — Spain's leading region for data-centre expansion, ahead of Castilla-La Mancha and Andalucía. The collective has acted as the central convener of joint alegaciones against the Amazon and Microsoft Aragón complexes along two principal lines.

• Amazon Web Services alegaciones (January 2025). The collective signed jointly with the Asociación Naturalista de Aragón, Amigas de la Tierra, Ecologistas en Acción, Ingeniería sin Fronteras, Plataforma en Defensa de los Paisajes de Teruel, Red Aragonesa por el Agua Pública and SEO/BirdLife on a single coordinated set of alegaciones against five Amazon Web Services data-centre expansions across four Aragonese municipalities — described in the collective's announcement as the most numerous and varied alegaciones presented against data centres in Spain to date. Amazon's three already-authorised Aragón data centres are licensed for 755,720 cubic metres of water per year — equivalent to irrigating more than 200 hectares of corn, one of the region's main crops — and Amazon had applied in December 2024 to increase that licensed consumption by 48%; the combined Aragón complex is projected to use more electricity than the entire Aragón region currently consumes.
• Microsoft Aragón alegaciones (January 2026). A year later, the collective convened a second joint alegaciones set with Ecologistas en Acción, ANSAR, No es sequía es saqueo, APUDEPA, the Asociación Vecinal Montes de Torrero-Venecia, the Plataforma en Defensa Estepa Huerva, Sermo, the Asociación Ciudadana de Muel and Juncar es Vida — with nine further supporting endorsements including the Federación de Barrios de Zaragoza — against Microsoft's three proposed Aragón mega data centres in Puerto Venecia (Zaragoza), Polígono Centrovía (La Muela) and Villamayor de Gállego. Microsoft's combined Aragón complex carries a 1,846 MW power concession and an announced 10,709 GWh annual consumption that would make it Aragón's second-largest energy consumer.

The coalition pattern is the campaign's signature contribution. By gathering ecologist organisations, neighbourhood associations, agricultural-defence platforms, water-rights networks and birdlife groups under single alegaciones, the collective has built a Spanish civil-society coalition shape that did not previously exist in opposition to hyperscale AI infrastructure — and is the principal mechanism by which the resistance has been able to bring the administrative-process level of objection (the alegaciones route) into structural use against the buildout.

Tactics and allied milieu

The collective's tactics extend beyond alegaciones into public-information litigation (early court action was necessary to obtain water-allocation data from public bodies that should have been disclosable on request), public-facing research output (a standing report on Aragonese data centres titled El precio de las nubes — "The price of the clouds"), and a sustained calendar of community talks and presentations across Spanish cities. The collective coordinates with NoCentrosDeDatosAragon and local groups in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Iruñea and Logroño, works in cross-border activist networks with allies in France, Portugal and Ireland, and sits inside the broader Spanish-speaking technological-sovereignty, digital-rights and free-software milieu. Recent allied work includes legal-action crowdfunding for the Aragón alegaciones, Extinction Rebellion-hosted events in Madrid, and the Calafou-hosted "Hackea La Tierra" event in April 2026.

Place in the movement

Tu Nube Seca Mi Río is the corpus's first Spanish grassroots local-group anchor and closes the Spain geographic gap on the AI-infrastructure water-justice front. It is also the corpus's first Spanish-speaking European local-group on hyperscale-AI water-extraction grounds, joining a small but growing constellation of grassroots local-group anchors organising against hyperscale AI compute siting in water-stressed Global South and Global South-adjacent geographies — alongside the Chilean Cerrillos community-of-residents collective MOSACAT and the Mexican Querétaro women-led environmental-defender collective Voceras de la Madre Tierra. The three local-groups share a structural similarity: small Spanish-speaking community-organising vehicles, organising against hyperscale AI water extraction in drought-stressed regions, using public-information requests, legal-and-administrative objections (alegaciones / amparos / environmental-tribunal interventions) and public-facing framing rather than purely confrontational tactics.

Tu Nube Seca Mi Río's distinctive contribution to that constellation is the coalition-convener role at national scale. Where MOSACAT and Voceras are commune- and state-scoped (Cerrillos and Querétaro respectively) and lead their own campaigns with smaller allied sets, Tu Nube Seca Mi Río has built a multi-organisation Spanish civil-society coalition spanning ecologist, water-rights, birdlife, neighbourhood-association and agricultural-defence groups, and uses the alegaciones administrative route as the principal mechanism. It is also the first corpus entity centring its critique on the cloud-as-political-abstraction — the political-economy claim that the hegemonic techno-capitalist framing of internet infrastructure as "the cloud" is itself the obstacle to seeing where the water comes from. Founder Aurora Gómez is a well-sourced candidate for a future Person / Voice entry: she carries substantial standing public output across Spanish-language outlets (La Marea, El Español, briega, El Alto Jalón radio) and English-language outlets (Green European Journal, the Guardian / SourceMaterial), and her public framings now anchor the Spanish-language grassroots discourse on AI-infrastructure water-justice.