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

What happened

According to The Guardian’s source item, ‘What you see here is a wetland without water’: how the datacentre boom is exacerbating Chile’s mega-drought, The country is positioning itself as Latin America’s next technology hub, but communities are pushing back The Andes mountains frame what was once a wetland – now a stretch of dry, yellowed grass. Rodrigo Vallejos, a final-year law student, noticed the change five years ago while observing the Quilicura wetland, on the northern outskirts of Santiago. One of Chile ’s largest swamps, spanning 468.4 hectares (about 1,200 acres) and partially protected , was drying up right before his eyes. “What you see here is a wetland without water,” says Vallejos, who has investigated the causes alongside activists from the group Resistencia Socioambiental de Quilicura. “I discovered that Quilicura is home to the largest concentration of datacentres in Latin America.” Continue reading…

Context

The development sits in VINI’s Technology file for readers following technology, science, product policy, markets, infrastructure, and the public consequences of innovation. The original report is linked so readers can check the source account, follow later updates, and compare new coverage against the first published record. The source item is dated 2026-05-26T13:00:51+00:00.

What to watch

Open questions include whether primary sources issue follow-up statements, whether local or market impacts become clearer, and whether additional reporting changes the timeline or adds material context.

Source

Primary source: ‘What you see here is a wetland without water’: how the datacentre boom is exacerbating Chile’s mega-drought via The Guardian. VINI cites and links the source; it does not reproduce the publisher’s full article text without rights clearance.