Opinion: The AI boom is quietly choking people in East Asia
The race to power chips and data centers is reviving fossil fuels across the region
Yujie Xue is an international communications officer at Greenpeace East Asia, based in Hong Kong. She is a former award-winning journalist who covered Asia's climate change, energy transition and cleantech sectors.
Inside her home in Kaohsiung, Taiwan's southern industrial hub, 79-year-old Chen Yu-xi keeps two stacks of documents. One tracks her decades-long dispute with the state utility Taipower over pollution from fossil-fuel plants, the other contains her lung cancer diagnosis. She describes her life as that of a "human air purifier," absorbing the costs of Taiwan's industrial growth through her own lungs.