Google Canelones data center, Canelones, Canelones Department

Google's Uruguayan data center is in the Parque de las Ciencias in Canelones, on Route 101 near Carrasco International Airport outside Montevideo. The zone lies beside Colonia Nicolich. For years nobody outside the government knew how much water the plant would take, because Google had written confidentiality clauses into its agreement with Uruguay and the state agreed to keep the environmental projections classified. Two researchers, Daniel Pena of the University of the Republic and Enol Nieto Jiménez of the BETA Tech Center, sued the Ministry of Environment together with the water groups CNDAV and Coordinación por el Agua to force the figures out, citing the article of the constitution that requires public participation in water management. On World Water Day, March 22, 2023, more than forty organisations and over 3,000 people marched through central Montevideo against the data center and other projects they said privatised water. After they won in court, the documents showed the plant would need about 2 million gallons (7.6 million litres) of water a day to cool its servers, equivalent to the domestic daily use of 55,000 people.

Montevideo declared a water emergency in June 2023.

On March 25, 2024 the Movimiento por un Uruguay Sustentable and Amnesty International opened a public campaign before the comment period closed on April 5. They asked the Ministry of Environment to make Google account for the carbon behind its electricity demand, for its waste, and for taking the plant apart at the end of its life, and noted that the company had promised 50 jobs on a site that pays no tax. Google redrew the project. It shrank from about 30 hectares to about 10 and swapped the cooling towers for a closed air-cooled system that uses no water and produces no wastewater. The revised campus was still reckoned to draw the electricity of about 200,000 households a year.

Work began on August 30, 2024, with Google putting about US$850 million into the site. The Intendencia de Canelones gave the campus about 400 permanent jobs and 800 workers at the peak of construction. Eduardo López, who runs Google Cloud in Latin America, said the talks had begun in 2018 and the project was settled in 2020. President Luis Lacalle Pou and the intendente of Canelones, Marcelo Metediera, were both there. Critics pointed out that the site sits in a free trade zone and pays no tax, and that the environmental summary expected it to breach air quality standards for PM10 and NO2 during operation.

The environmental authorisation came in June 2024 from then environment minister Robert Bouvier, with seven conditions, among them that Google drop drinking water for cooling in favour of chillers. In April 2026 President Yamandú Orsi toured the site and said the works were "muy avanzadas, más de lo que suponíamos" (very advanced, more than we assumed).

Now the neighbours have gone to law. On July 29, 2026, four families living less than 100 metres from the site filed an appeal with the Ministry of Environment asking it to annul the authorisation granted to Eleanor Applications SRL, the company behind the Google project. The environmental study had identified them as sensitive receptors, one as the most vulnerable neighbour for noise, but they say they were never contacted, and they complain of industrial lighting and noise from night-time pipe flushing, load bank tests and generators. La Mañana reported that the permit file models the campus's 27 generators exceeding Uruguay's legal limit for nitrogen dioxide 17 times over if all run at once in a power cut. The appeal asks the ministry to annul the authorisation or, failing that, to change it to deal with the impacts; the ministry decides, and meanwhile construction goes on. Orsi met Google's global head of government affairs, Karan Bhatia, at the United Nations in September 2026, and the data center was one of the topics.