U.S. giants Microsoft and Amazon are investing billions to snatch up land in the increasingly water-stressed territory with the aim of building data centers, which typically use many millions of liters of water a year.

The Spanish and regional governments are ecstatic. The country’s former digital minister celebrated Amazon’s decision to move in last year, boasting that Spain is “at the forefront of technology innovation and Artificial Intelligence in Europe.” It goes hand-in-hand with the European Union’s push to build more data centers on home soil: The European Commission wants to triple the EU’s data center capacity over the next five to seven years.

But the locals aren’t buying what Big Tech is peddling.

While the likes of Amazon promise more than €15 billion of investment, jobs, partnerships with local schools, community education programs, water infrastructure updates and “sustainability initiatives,” grassroots groups are springing up, wary of tech giants muscling in on their water resources.

“In the end the farmer never wins,” said ‍Chechu Sánchez, an Aragonese farmer speaking at an event on data centers in Zaragoza, Aragon’s capital. “Whenever there is plunder by foreign capital, the farmer, the people of the municipalities — we never win, we don’t benefit at all.”

Activist Aurora Gómez and her collective Tu Nube Seca Mi Río (which translates as “your cloud is drying up my river”) is heading up a campaign for a moratorium on all new data centers in Spain. Farmers, Europe’s most prolific water users, are among the most vulnerable, said Gómez, and — when they find out about the data centers’ water usage — the most incensed.