AWS Padre Hurtado (Santiago) data center, Santiago, Santiago Metropolitan Region

Amazon Web Services' Padre Hurtado data center, the company's first built data center campus in Chile, sits on an 18.7-hectare site in the Padre Hurtado district, in the Santiago Metropolitan Region. The $205 million, two-stage project cleared Chile's environmental review in January 2024, and its first building was due to be finished in 2025, with a second building scheduled for 2028.

The first stage was a data center of 4,630 square meters; the second adds 3,470 square meters, according to BNamericas as reported by DCD. The campus includes 12 diesel backup generators and what Amazon describes as low-water-consumption cooling, air conditioning and fire control systems; its capacity has not been disclosed. The Santiago Metropolitan Region's Environmental Evaluation Commission backed the project unanimously, The Clinic reported, and it is meant to serve local users of Amazon's cloud.

The worry around Santiago is water. Chile has been in a national drought since 2010, expected to last until 2040, and a small data center using water-based cooling at one megawatt needs about 25 million liters of water a year, Rest of World reported. "It's turned into extractivism," said Tania Rodríguez of the activist group Mosacat. "We end up being everybody's backyard." Activists want companies to file full environmental impact studies rather than self-assessed declarations; an AWS spokesperson said the company had complied with all the requirements of its environmental impact declarations for Padre Hurtado and Huechuraba.

Amazon's second Santiago project, in Huechuraba, drew almost 50 citizen observations in 2023. In April 2026 Chile's Second Environmental Court turned down residents' claim against that project's environmental approval, finding it did not need to be assessed together with a high-voltage line that had been dropped. The court said any future high-voltage project would need its own environmental assessment, including the cumulative impacts alongside projects already cleared, such as the Amazon data center. Google's second Santiago data center, authorized to draw 228 liters of water a second, was halted by the environmental tribunal until Google reassessed its impact, after protests by Mosacat.

Environmental approvals in Chile are handled by the Environmental Evaluation Service, and its approval rate for evaluations is 94%, its executive director has said. In May 2025 AWS committed more than $4 billion to a Chile cloud region with three availability zones, to launch by the end of 2026, and said its data centers in the country would be largely air-cooled, using water for cooling only around four percent of the year. Padre Hurtado's second building is the next stage, scheduled for 2028.