Google, Microsoft face water pushback across Latin America

Training ChatGPT required an estimated 185,000 gallons of water, and a single hyperscale data center can run through 1 million to 5 million gallons a day, roughly the draw of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. That pressure is now meeting organized local resistance across Latin America, according to a long Rest of World report by Paris Marx adapted from his new book "Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires."

Google's $200 million project in Cerrillos, on the southwest side of Santiago, would draw 169 liters of water per second. In a single day, Marx writes, that is more than the area's 80,000 residents use annually for drinking. A community group called MOSACAT formed in 2019 to pick apart the technical filings, and in a December 2019 municipal referendum 49% of voters rejected the project while 38% supported it. "Usually these reports use quite technical language, and this is a working-class community where not many people are lawyers," said Sebastián Lehuedé, a King's College London researcher who studied the fight. In February 2022, Google proposed an air-cooling alternative.

Microsoft's plans for a data center in Quilicura, another Santiago commune, were announced in 2022 while water-rationing rules were in force. "Use water, dry up the territory, but don't give anything back," said Vicente Bardales of the Quilicura Socio Environmental Resistance group.

In Uruguay, a Google campus planned for Canelones would need 2 million gallons of drinking water a day during what was then the country's worst drought in 70 years. "Only a tiny proportion of water in Uruguay is used for human consumption," said Daniel Pena, a researcher at the University of the Republic. Near the Brazilian city of Caucaia, a TikTok-serving facility sits in a region that was officially in emergency drought in 16 of the 21 years between 2003 and 2024.

Two researchers we follow were circulating the piece on the day it ran.