In Cerrillos, a working-class district on the southwest edge of Santiago, Chile, a group of neighbours sat down with Google’s environmental paperwork and tried to work out what a new data center would mean for their water. “Usually these reports use quite technical language, and this is a working-class community where not many people are lawyers, for example, or experts on ecology,” said Sebastián Lehuedé, a King’s College London researcher who spent time there.
They called themselves MOSACAT, short for Community Socio-Environmental Movement for Water and Land. What they found alarmed them. By Google’s own projections, the $200 million facility would draw 169 liters of water every second. In a single day it would use as much as all 80,000 residents of Cerrillos drink in a year.
The water was meant to come from an aquifer already under an extraction restriction since 2005. Weeks before the environmental authority approved the project, that restriction had been upgraded to a full ban on new extraction. Chile had also been in an unprecedented drought since 2010, and by 2021 more than half of its 19 million people lived in areas of severe water scarcity.
The activists won a local vote in December 2019. Of the Cerrillos residents who took part, 49% rejected the project and 38% wanted it to go ahead. The municipality and residents filed claims against Google in 2020. In February 2022 the company came back with a revised plan to cool the building with air-conditioning alone.
Quilicura, Canelones, Caucaia
Across Santiago, Microsoft announced a data center for Quilicura in 2022, the year strict water rationing began in the city. Vicente Bardales of the Quilicura Socio Environmental Resistance group told Rest of World that companies arrive only to “use water, [and] dry up the territory, but don’t give anything back to the population.”
The pattern repeated across Latin America. In 2023 Montevideo went into a state of emergency during Uruguay’s worst drought in 70 years. While residents protested industry’s use of water, they learned Google planned a data center in Canelones, less than an hour to the north. Researcher Daniel Pena of the University of the Republic had to go to court to get the plans from the Ministry of Environment. They showed a 72-acre site that would use 2 million gallons of water a day. “Now we have Google planning to use enormous quantities of water,” Pena said.
Brazil already has more than 180 data centers, though many regions face regular drought. Near Fortaleza, at least four large facilities were looking at a free-trade zone in Caucaia. One would cover the area of 12 football fields and cost an estimated $10 billion. A local wind energy company would technically own it, but it is being built to serve TikTok. The region has had emergency drought conditions in 16 of the 21 years from 2003 to 2024.
The scale of the draw
Paris Marx, in his book “Hyperscale,” excerpted by Rest of World, writes that a hyperscale data center can take between 1 and 5 million gallons of water a day, about what a city of 10,000 to 50,000 people uses. The GPUs behind generative AI run hotter than older chips, so they need more energy or water for cooling. Data centers also need clean water, and tapping public drinking supplies is cheaper than treating their own, which sets them against nearby communities.
