Divergent Futures in a Damaged Territory: The Rise of DataCenters and Water Conflicts in Santiago de Chile
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Date
2025
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Abstract
As promises surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven decision-making increasingly shape debates on innovation and technological development in Chile, data centers have emerged as critical infrastructures supporting visions of digital modernization. Positioned today as one of Latin America’s leading technological hubs, Chile has become a focal point for the expansion of these infrastructures. A series of narratives has been constructed around their inevitability and urgency, framing them as essential to national progress and global competitiveness. This article examines the controversy surrounding the construction of a Google data center in Cerrillos, Santiago de Chile. Through a case study grounded in interviews and citizen mobilization, we analyze how divergent sociotechnical imaginaries confront each other in debates over water consumption, “extractivism,” and the ecological limits of AI infrastructures. Drawing on the concept of divergent futures, we explore how this infrastructural dispute reveals not only disagreements about land use and environmental impact, but also ontological conflicts over what constitutes progress, development, and the future itself. We argue that these frictions illuminate the material and planetary dimensions of AI infrastructures, demanding an ethics of “planetarity” attuned to more-than-human coexistence, territorial justice, and the reorientation of digital futures amid the climate crisis.
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Data center, Artificial intelligence, Territory, Extractivism, Divergent futures