Amazon announces billion-euro investment in Chile
Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to spend four billion US dollars on cloud infrastructure in Chile. The high electricity and water consumption raises concerns.
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Amazon's cloud computing division Amazon Web Services (AWS) will invest four billion US dollars to build its first data centers and other cloud infrastructures in Chile. This was announced by the South America Director of AWS, Juan Pablo Estévez, to the news agency Reuters. The new facilities, which will provide "significant" computing power for services such as generative AI, are expected to be operational in the second half of 2026. All the necessary approvals for the project have been granted, Estévez said.
Due to the increasing use of cloud-based technologies and the hype surrounding generative AI, the demand for data centers has risen sharply worldwide. At the same time, there is growing concern about the impact of these energy- and water-intensive tech projects, not least in Chile, which has been suffering from drought for many years. Only last autumn, the US company Google withdrew plans for a planned data center project in Santiago de Chile due to negative environmental impact assessments by Chilean courts and announced that it would revise the plans. The court had raised concerns about the high energy and water consumption of the computer farm. Microsoft is also planning a cloud computing center in Chile, which is due to go into operation this year.
Cooling concepts without water
Estévez said that the planned AWS data center would only use four percent of the year –, which corresponds to a good two weeks – of water to cool the servers. According to Estévez, the consumption is comparable to that of around eight households over a period of 15 years. Air cooling and evaporation technologies would be used for the rest of the year. Google is working on a similar concept for its project. The AWS manager added that Amazon has been covering its energy consumption entirely with renewable energy since 2023.
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After Brazil and Mexico, Chile is the third country in Latin America where AWS is building a large-scale cloud infrastructure. Just at the beginning of last year, Amazon announced billions in investments in Mexico. It said it would invest five billion US dollars in an infrastructure cluster in Queretaro in central Mexico to offer customers advanced and secure cloud technologies.
(akn)
