Tania Rodríguez

After 15 years of drought in Chile's capital, Santiago, the city’s reservoirs are running dry. Following a particularly dry spell in 2022, the government announced plans to ration water that could involve rotating day-long cuts to different parts of the city. Yet Google’s only data center in the region consumes about 3 gallons of water per second, or just over 100 million gallons per year. The facility’s cooling system expels heat from the tens of thousands of computers inside by ejecting water vapor. In the Cerrillos district, 12 miles further south, Google received permits in 2020 to build a second data center that was authorized to extract more than 14 times as much water. It was part of a global push by Google and its rivals to build the infrastructure for artificial intelligence, which relies on powerful data centers. Since 2020, Google’s global water consumption has risen 42%, according to the company’s environmental reports.

After learning of the $200 million proposal in Cerrillos, a group of residents formed the Socio Environmental Community Movement for Land and Water. Soon known by its Spanish acronym Mosacat, the group successfully challenged Google and convinced the tech giant to change its plans. Tania Rodríguez, one of Mosacat’s founding members, says the group worked to include a question about the proposed data center in a local non-binding referendum. The largest share of voters were against the plan.

Although the vote was non-binding, “that marked the turning point in negotiations with the company,” Rodríguez says. After several meetings with Google and its representatives in Chile, the company agreed to use an air cooling system instead of water, she says. "We strive to build the world’s most energy-efficient computing infrastructure, supported by responsible water use practices,” a Google spokesperson told TIME in an emailed statement. “Google’s current data center projects take into account the specific conditions of the places where they’re developed."Mosacat’s activism helped inspire protests against another planned Google data center in nearby Uruguay, according to Daniel Pena, a researcher at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, who is a member of activist group, Coordinación por el Agua, which translates as “coordination for the water.” And in 2024, a Chilean environmental tribunal ruled that Google had not sufficiently taken the effects of climate change into consideration in its initial application, asking that the company do so before it continues construction. Although the court’s decision came after Google had pledged to change its plans, it “ratified what we had been saying for a long time,” Rodríguez says.