Nations around the world are rapidly building out the infrastructure needed to take part in the AI boom–including massive, multibillion dollar investments in data centers, which house and manage the servers needed to process, store and share information.

Yet data centers guzzle up energy and water, needed to power servers and cool systems. And that may end up putting strain on another industry that’s just as important for a country’s future: Agriculture.

“The electricity that we’re using for our data centers and AI chips? Don’t forget that it is also required for us to grow food,” said Gerard Lim, CEO of Agroz, a vertical farming startup, at the Fortune Innovation Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Tuesday.

Singapore, for example, briefly paused data center investments in 2019 due to c

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