Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao

In 2020, the government went a step further. It announced a project to build a new underwater cable, akin to a data highway, for connecting the Asia Pacific straight to the Americas through Chile’s central coast, not far from Santiago. Chile would become a global hub for digital infrastructure. Google backed the partnership. But in July 2019, as Google began the paperwork for its second data center in Chile, a group of residents was watching. The company had chosen Cerrillos for its new location, another working-class municipality bordering Santiago. Like Quilicura, Cerrillos has a long history of being overlooked and abandoned. From the 1930s to the 1990s, a cement factory that belonged to a Belgian company contaminated the community with lethal levels of asbestos, leading to what one Chilean historian called “the largest industrial genocide” in the country.