Google Quilicura data center, Santiago, Santiago Metropolitan Region

Google's Quilicura data center, at El Molino 2130 in the commune of Quilicura on the northern edge of Santiago, Chile, went online in January 2015, according to Google.

In September 2018 Google announced a $140 million expansion of what was then its only Latin American data center, to triple the campus to 11.2 hectares, with 1,000 construction jobs and 120 permanent positions, at an event attended by President Sebastián Piñera, DCD reported. Google's Curie subsea cable links the Quilicura data center to Los Angeles. In 2019 Google began environmental permitting for a second, $200 million Chilean data center on land between San Bernardo and Cerrillos in the Metropolitan Region, InvestChile reported, citing El Mercurio.

Water is the fight. The Quilicura wetland, one of Chile's largest at 468.4 hectares and partly protected, has been drying up, and a May 2026 Guardian report by Anna Heikkinen described it as "a stretch of dry, yellowed grass". "What you see here is a wetland without water," said Rodrigo Vallejos, a law student who investigated the causes with the group Resistencia Socioambiental de Quilicura. "I discovered that Quilicura is home to the largest concentration of datacentres in Latin America", he said. The Guardian reported that companies such as Google and Microsoft defend their water use, while residents point to few jobs, high power use and failed environmental offsets.

Google says it has invested in wetlands restoration and precision irrigation projects in the area. New data centers in the Santiago region go through Chile's Environmental Assessment Service, as Google's second project did.