One of Chile’s data centers, photo courtesy of the Nearshore Americas.
Google planned to use 7.6 million liters of water daily to cool its servers—in a city that hasn’t had enough water in 15 years. Following local outrage and legal challenges, a Chilean environmental court has partially reversed a permit that allowed Google to build a data center in the country, asking the US company to take climate change into account. Chile’s deliberate push to become an AI hub exposes how the government is prioritizing foreign tech investments over equitable access to essential resources like water—a choice that should worry similar communities that already struggle with everyday access to water.
AI has three primary uses for water: cooling data centers to keep computers at an optimal temperature, indirectly supporting electricity generation, and during the manufacturing process for AI hardware, such as its servers. Uniquely, fresh water, i.e., low-salinity water from rivers, lakes, and aquifers rather than seawater, is in high demand due to the corrosive nature of saltwater.
From the outset, Chile’s emerging data centers have been seen as pioneers in Latin America’s digital future. The country’s National Data Centers Plan promises to transform Chile into the region’s AI hub, with investment agencies attracting multinational corporations like Google and Microsoft. There have been efforts to implement multiple forms of renewable energy and desalination plants to reduce demand for fresh water. By turning the Pacific into a low-salinity water tap and the desert into a solar farm, Chile can seemingly meet its population’s water needs while balancing AI development.
Yet, water in Chile has never been a simple issue. Central Chile has been in a megadrought for more than a decade, with river flows and reservoirs shrinking, while certain rural communities rely on emergency tanker deliveries as their only source of drinking water. The underlying reason, beyond climate change, has political roots. When water resources became privatized under dictator Augusto Pinochet’s 1981 Water Code, water became a market commodity to attract investment and promote export-led growth. Although there have been recent reforms in nominally recognizing water as a national good for public use, studies still show an extreme concentration of water rights among a small number of people. In this context, improvements in desalination technologies have not primarily benefitted those facing shortages; most of the expensive, energy-intensive desalinated seawater goes first to mining and green export industries such as lithium and hydrogen, rather than the households most affected by scarcity.
Despite these obvious concerns, data centers continue to cluster in Chile. Companies have chosen Chile due to its proximity to capital, fiber-optic cables, and corporate demand, coupled with the fact that the government provides a very investment-friendly regulatory environment, including streamlined permitting processes and targeted incentives under its National Data Center Plan. This strategy has been embraced domestically by officials who promise to create more than 80,000 jobs and to position Chile as the next tech hub.
However, public reaction has been far from supportive. In Cerrillos, the district in Santiago where Google’s data center project was planned, residents and environmental groups challenged the idea that a single data center should be allowed to pump millions of liters of water a day from an already stressed aquifer. The Chilean Environmental Court’s decision to partially reverse the permit forced regulators to treat climate change and groundwater stress as core issues, forcing Google to rethink its design by shifting away from the most water-intensive cooling systems to fan-based cooling. This was a rare win for local institutions in pushing a global tech giant to reform.
Similarly, in Quilicura, a municipality on Santiago’s periphery, public sentiment is best reflected through street action. Protests in the region erupted early in 2023, featuring “human-powered chatbots” known as Quili.AI, in which volunteers answered questions like AI chatbots for a day to underline how little of our digital convenience is “essential” compared with access to drinking water. These actions demonstrate that the debate is not just about the optimal environment for housing large language models. Communities are also concerned about what happens when the aquifer runs low, causing people to struggle for drinking water, while foreign AI models can train freely.
The omission to discuss water resources is political. The EU, known for its more restrained approach to AI development, passed regulation that focuses mainly on energy efficiency and algorithmic risk. In the US, debates revolve around innovation, competition with China, and national security. What is happening in Chile exposes the other side of global AI development: as a country positioned as a recipient rather than innovator of AI technology, its ability to align itself with global development remains limited to the expense of its own resources. Chile’s case, therefore, resonates far beyond: it shows how governments can deliberately prioritize foreign AI investments over equitable access to water, forcing communities already living in water scarcity to compete with large data centers. Until AI regulations treat water as seriously as energy consumption and bias reproduction, every AI model deepens inequalities in places that can least afford it.
Meredith (GS ’28) is in the Dual BA Program between Sciences Po and Columbia University, with a passion for politics, law, and climate action. She can be reached at aw3471@columbia.edu.