During my conversation with Brockman and Sutskever, I had referenced one of them: the carbon footprint of training such models. In June 2019, Emma Strubell, a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, had been the first to coauthor a paper showing that the footprint for developing large language models was growing at a startling rate. Where neural networks could once be trained on powerful laptops, their new scale meant their training was beginning to require data centers drawing significant amounts of energy from carbon-based sources. In the paper, Strubell estimated that training the version of the Transformer that Google used in its search for just a single cycle—in other words, feeding it some data and letting it compute a statistical model of that data—could consume roughly 1,500 kilowatt hours of energy.

Under Pinochet’s rule, Chile privatized nearly everything—education, health care, the pension system, even water. The strategy produced economic growth; it also fueled stunning inequality. Chile is among the most unequal countries in the world today, with nearly a quarter of the country’s income concentrated among a few powerful families in the 1 percent. Having never meaningfully industrialized, it also remains tethered to the extraction economy that makes it relevant to higher geopolitical powers.

And so, as the AI boom arrived, Chile would become ground zero for a new scale of extractivism, as the supplier of the industry’s insatiable appetite for raw resources, not just its copper and lithium in the north but also its land, water, and energy resources for a growing crop of data centers in the Santiago metropolitan region. In May 2024, the government proudly announced that the country would welcome twenty-eight new data centers, on top of its existing twenty-two, over the coming years, bringing in $2.6 billion of foreign investment.

The land and energy required to support these megacampuses are but two inputs in the global supply chain of data center expansion. So, too, is the extraordinary volume of minerals including copper and lithium needed to build the hardware—computers, cables, power lines, batteries, backup generators—and the extraordinary volume of potable—yes, potable—water often needed to cool the servers. (The water must be clean enough to avoid clogging pipes and bacterial growth; potable water meets that standard.) According to an estimate from researchers at the University of California, Riverside, surging AI demand could consume 1.1 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons of fresh water globally a year by 2027, or half the water annually consumed in the UK. Those effects will not be felt evenly. Another study found that in the US, one-fifth of data centers were already drawing that water before the generative AI boom from moderately or highly stressed watersheds due to drought or other factors. And in Global South countries like Chile, it’s often the most vulnerable communities who have borne the brunt of these accelerating economies of extraction.

As more and more communities have watched data centers affect their lives, a growing number have pushed back vehemently against their unfettered development.

In Brazil, a 2023 art exhibition coproduced by a Chilean university showed the vast chasm between the reality of Latin America’s rich Indigenous cultures and the woefully bereft depictions of them spit out by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion as primitive, technologically inept peoples.

In recent years, the Atacameños have mounted more and more resistance. They fly black flags on their houses to denounce the exploitation of their lands and their community. They’ve organized protests to physically block the roads that company buses and trucks must take to get to the mines. They’ve contracted lawyers to assert their legal rights as Indigenous peoples under international law, which protects their cultural and territorial sovereignty. As companies and the Chilean government have been forced to invite them to negotiations, central to Indigenous demands are the need for the government to conduct research into the health of the Atacama Desert’s ecosystems and to quantify the water loss and any irreparable damage.

Pena had read about hyperscalers using potable water, even during major droughts, and the activism of communities like MOSACAT that had resisted the projects. But when he downloaded the details of the project, the water numbers were marked as confidential. After submitting a public information request, which he had successfully done around twenty times, the ministry continued to withhold the numbers, saying they were proprietary information. Pena wondered what they were hiding and worried about the precedent it would set for other cloud companies that would inevitably begin to eye Uruguay, following Google’s lead, for their own expansion. So he evoked the water clause in the constitution. With the help of a lawyer friend who was willing to work pro bono, he sued the ministry.

In March 2023, four months later, Pena won the case in a surprising victory. The environmental ministry revealed that Google’s data center planned to use two million gallons of water a day directly from the drinking water supply, equivalent to the daily water consumption of fifty-five thousand people. With much of Montevideo receiving salt water in their taps not long after, the revelations were explosive.