In Telegram and Discord groups, Fuentes traded tips with other Venezuelans working on Appen as they sought to deduce the rules like an elaborate puzzle. They discovered that using a VPN to appear to be in the US earned them the most money. They also learned—the hard way—that it was a high-risk endeavor. Appen searched for this kind of behavior, which was a violation of platform rules, and punished workers by closing their accounts. An account closure could be devastating. Any earnings a worker hadn’t withdrawn would vanish, and opening up a fresh account meant starting back at the bottom, with the least-well-paid tasks or, increasingly, no tasks at all.

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.

That summer, as Google filed a report with Chile’s environmental agency for approval of its data center—a largely rubber stamp process—MOSACAT, a water activist group, began combing through all 347 pages of the filing. Buried in its depths, Google said that its data center planned to use an estimated 169 liters of fresh drinking water per second to cool its servers. In other words, the data center could use more than one thousand times the amount of water consumed by the entire population of Cerrillos, roughly eighty-eight thousand residents, over the course of a year. MOSACAT found this unacceptable. Not only would the facility be taking that water directly from Cerrillos’s public water source, it would do so at a time when the nation’s entire drinking water supply was under threat. In 2019, as with Iowa and Arizona, Chile was already nine years and counting into a devastating and historically unprecedented megadrought.