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

by Karen Hao

Microsoft projected that it would need a significantly lower amount of water than Google had in Cerrillos. Even still, Vallejos worried. The drought in Chile had only gotten worse and was expected to last until 2040. Quilicura’s wetlands were suffering acutely, on top of industrial encroachment, from accelerating desertification. On its website, Microsoft boasted about new cutting-edge innovations in data center cooling systems that would mean its facilities didn’t need to use water. If Microsoft had the capability to build waterless data centers, why wasn’t it doing so in Quilicura? “It is deeply striking that a company with as much reputation as Microsoft publicly presents an environmentally friendly discourse, but in reality does not comply with global innovation standards in a third world country like Chile,” Vallejos later wrote in an article. Microsoft would subsequently explain that the innovations it had advertised were still under development and only being piloted in a place in the US. “Then why do they promise these things” on their website? Vallejos asks.