Digitalization in South America: Chile is relaxing environmental regulations for data centers

In Chile, the round table is at the same time an object, a meeting place and a metaphor. For five years, the Chilean government set up around 80 working groups to promote the expansion of the country's digital infrastructure. Politicians, entrepreneurs and experts came together again and again. The result had well-known names: the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, the National Data Center Plan.

The working groups should enable exchange, promote negotiations and work together to design the future of the country. But the material foundations of artificial intelligence were left out, explains architect Nicolás Díaz Bejarano: land, water, raw materials, territories and the communities living there had no place at the table.

15 journalists from 12 Latin American countries are taking part in the “Euromérica” workshop organized by the taz panter foundation. It's about the opportunities and challenges of the EU-Mercosur agreement and Latin American-European relations. A supplement will appear in the taz on December 5th, and there will be a public talk in the taz canteen on December 9th. All texts can be found here.

Together with other curators, Díaz Bejarano therefore developed the exhibition “Inteligencias Reflexivas” for the Chilean pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. They mapped the 25 planned or existing data center projects in the country and presented their results on a long table. Material, visual and acoustic evidence made those actors audible who had not previously had a say in the political debates.

Until then, Chilean environmental law did not recognize data centers as an independent category for environmental impact assessment. Nevertheless, the systems had to be checked due to the fuel used by their emergency generators. As soon as they stored more than 80 tons of fuel, environmental assessments and a procedure with citizen participation were required.

A decree signed in July 2025 by the left-wing government of Gabriel Boric raised this threshold to 1,000 tons – twelve and a half times higher. For data centers that store diesel for their backup generators, this change was critical. Of the 17 plants that had undergone an environmental assessment since 2020, 15 would have fallen below the new limit and would no longer have had to go through the process.

“Instead of creating spaces for conversation, the absence of debate is cemented,” says Díaz Bejarano more than a year after the exhibition in Venice. “The opportunities for exchange are curtailed and environmental assessments no longer take place.”

A data center is a building full of servers that store and process everything we do on the Internet - from an email to a request to an artificial intelligence. The systems run around the clock and consume electricity on an industrial scale. The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects global data center electricity demand to nearly double from 485 terawatt hours in 2025 to 950 terawatt hours in 2030. That would correspond to around three percent of global electricity consumption.

Because data centers cannot be easily shut down, they have diesel generators as backup power. However, their emissions are not included in the IEA estimate.

Cooling the servers is also energy and water intensive. Because the computers produce large amounts of heat. Around 700,000 liters of water evaporated just to cool Microsoft's data centers in the USA, where the GPT-3 language model was trained.

In July 2026, the Chilean Environmental Assessment Service (SEA) announced for the first time that a data center did not need to be included in the environmental assessment process. The Alto Jahuel facility was designed to store 990 tons of fuel. Since then, other companies have chosen the route through so-called “consultas de pertinencia” in order to receive the green light for their projects. In this process, project sponsors ask the SEA whether their project needs to be subject to an environmental assessment. Participation of the population is not planned.

Google suffered a significant defeat in 2024: The Second Environmental Court had revoked the approval for the company's first data center project. This envisaged extracting up to 169 liters of water per second from an aquifer that has been affected by an ongoing mega-drought since 2010.

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This year, Google returned with a corresponding request. It was submitted via the company Inversiones y Servicios Dataluna. The project sponsor stated that it wanted to store 695 tons of flammable substances.

An evaluation of the inquiries submitted to the SEA shows: A total of eight data center projects have now inquired as to whether they need to be subjected to an environmental assessment. All are below the new limit of 1,000 tonnes. Four of them state exactly 990 tons.

European capital is behind several projects in Chile. Spanish company Grenergy has unveiled two data center campuses in Buin and Til Til. In its strategic plan, it announced a combined IT capacity of 600 megawatts. The Danish investment fund Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners reports a storage capacity of 511 tons for a so-called hyperscale data center with an output of 100 megawatts in Lampa.

In Germany, the obligation to undergo an approval process does not depend on the size of the fuel storage facility, but rather on the performance of the machines. If the emergency generators have a combined thermal output of 50 megawatts, a formal procedure is required. This includes publicly available documents, a deadline for objections and, if necessary, a public hearing.

In 2024, the Marienpark data center in Berlin was approved on this basis. It has 48 diesel engines with a total output of 284 megawatts and also had to undergo an environmental impact assessment.

According to this German benchmark, all eight Chilean projects from 2026 would exceed the threshold. Your emergency generators achieve outputs between 95 and 168 megawatts.

Given the lack of opportunities for citizen participation, several Chilean civil society organizations have now turned to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. They are calling on the Commission to intervene with the Chilean state and recommend mandatory environmental assessments for data centers.

Francisco Parra is a journalist from Chile and director of Climate Tracker América Latina.

Translation from Spanish by Niklas Franzen