Google announced on Thursday it will invest US$850 million in its long-planned Terros data centre in Canelones, Uruguay, a month after convincing the government that the facility won’t exacerbate the country’s water shortage due to drought.
In a blog post on Thursday, Eduardo López, president of Google Cloud for Latin America, said the data centre in Canelones will bring greater connectivity across the Latin American region and improve access to growing demand for AI.
The Terros data centre has been in the works since 2019 when Google first announced plans to build it. However, the plan had been delayed by concerns from Uruguay’s Environment Ministry over the data centre’s cooling design that would use up to 7.6 million litres of potable water per day.
Uruguay, which has experienced a drought since 2018 that reached crisis proportions in July 2023, finally approved the project last month after Google reportedly agreed in November 2023 to make the project smaller, change to an air-cooling system and keep power usage to less than 560 GWh per year.
The Terros data centre will be Google’s second such facility in Latin America following the 2015 launch of the first one in Quilicura, Chile. According to Reuters, Google initially invested US$150 million in that data centre, followed by another US$140 million to expand the facility in 2018.
The Quilicura data centre has also raised concerns over water usage in Chile, which has been enduring its own prolonged drought for the last 15 years. In February, a Chilean environmental court partially reversed Google's permit to build the data centre, ordering it to revise its application to take effects of climate change into account. Google said in a statement the redesigned facility will use air-cooling instead.
In his blog post on Thursday, López didn’t mention the revised cooling techniques for the Terros data centre, but reiterated that Google is committed to clean energy, “and we’re proud to bring this commitment to our new data center in Uruguay, which already uses renewable energy in more than 90% of its energy matrix.”
