Google purchased twenty-nine hectares of land here, fifty-eight times the size of Antel’s total data center footprint, to establish a different home for its second data center in Latin America. But at the time, Uruguay did not in fact have an abundance of water. Like Chile, like Iowa, like Arizona, it was also experiencing a devastating drought. The water shortage was so severe that farmers were losing their entire harvests, costing the country over $1 billion in agricultural losses; by the summer of 2023, the Montevideo government would start mixing contaminated salt water into the city’s
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