From the Associated Press, November 2:
Data centers have become one of the most polarizing issues in the world. Argentina’s president wants to lure as many of them as he can get.
As residents and policymakers in the United States and Europe fight the facilities that power artificial intelligence, President Javier Milei is pitching Argentina as a haven, promising a hands-off approach to draw foreign investment his crisis-prone country needs.
Like his ally, U.S. President Donald Trump, Milei frequently posts AI-generated images on social media. He has proposed creating “nonhuman corporations” run entirely by AI agents.
“We are not going to regulate artificial intelligence,” Milei told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington last month. “We are going to leave it free.”
Visitor logs obtained by The Associated Press show a steady stream of tech figures meeting with Milei and his aides in recent months, from venture capitalist Peter Thiel to representatives of OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Oracle and data center companies. Foreign Ministry records show that data center developer Crusoe, which helped build OpenAI’s flagship campus in Texas, sought talks this year with Argentine energy officials about U.S. government-backed investments.
Milei’s hopes rest as much on geography as on ideology. Patagonia offers vast, open plains where noisy server farms can be built far from population centers, a chilly climate to cool the machines, powerful winds to generate electricity and one of the world’s largest shale deposits in Vaca Muerta to fuel power plants.
“In densely populated parts of the U.S. and Europe, there’s a lot of fighting over access to the grid and who should get the electricity,” said Marta Zlotkowska, head of international development at Green Capital, a Polish renewable energy company that plans to build a $3 billion data center in Patagonia to lease to big tech firms for AI computing, though it has yet to secure a customer.
“We compared potential locations for the project around the world and Argentina — well, Patagonia — came out on top in every category,” she said.
Patagonia’s AI promise
For Argentina’s energy industry, already booming as the Iran war hikes oil prices, data centers represent a tantalizing new market. Pampa Energía, one of the country’s biggest power companies, has announced plans to supply immense amounts of gas-fired power to a data center near Vaca Muerta and is seeking developers....
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