‘What you see here is a wetland without water’: how the datacentre boom is exacerbating Chile’s mega-drought

Quilicura’s experience with datacentres has raised the alarm in other parts of the Santiago region. In 2024, residents in the district of Cerrillos succeeded in halting plans for a second Google datacentre. “In 2019, we learned about the project in our community. When we realised the scale of water it would require, we became alarmed,” says Tania Rodríguez, a teacher who lives in the area.

Google had secured water rights allowing it to extract up to 228 litres per second – roughly equivalent to the consumption of 40,000 households – from Cerrillos’s groundwater reserves. In 2024, residents succeeded in having the project halted on the grounds that it had failed to adequately consider the impacts of the climate crisis. The company also agreed to review its cooling system.