President Javier Milei told the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington last month that Argentina will impose no rules on artificial intelligence, pitching the country as a regulation-free haven for the data centers that power it. According to Asharq Al-Awsat English, the promise rests on Patagonia's open plains, cold climate, wind and the Vaca Muerta shale deposit, and it has already drawn venture capitalist Peter Thiel, OpenAI, Amazon, Google and Oracle into meetings with his government.
For communities on the ground, the offer looks less like development than extraction. Milei's incentive scheme, which would cut corporate income tax from 25% to 15% for projects of at least $1 billion, requires no local access to computing capacity and no disclosure of energy or water use. The computing power, as critics keep pointing out, will be exported wherever Big Tech needs it.
A laboratory without safeguards
The comparison researchers reach for is clinical: capital moving south to run experiments it cannot legally run at home. Nicolás Wolovick, a computer science professor at the National University of Córdoba, said that without rules Argentina becomes a testing site for technologies rejected elsewhere.
Without rules, Argentina will become a laboratory, like when companies go to developing countries to test strange drugs they can't test in major developed countries.
That framing is not rhetorical. The European Union and a growing number of US states have adopted AI regulations, WTOP reported, and Milei is selling precisely the absence of such safeguards as a competitive advantage. The risks range from mass surveillance to cyberattacks, and Argentina's legal framework offers no protection against either. Even within Milei's own government, one senior official admitted that companies are waiting for basic rules on training AI with copyrighted works and transferring personal data abroad, according to AP News.
The colonial pattern here is not new. Vaca Muerta's shale has already been opened to foreign capital on favorable terms; the AI scheme extends the same logic into the digital sphere, with Patagonia cast as a resource frontier whose land, water and wind exist to fuel computation for elsewhere.
Who pays for the servers?
The Polish renewable energy company Green Capital plans a $3 billion data center on 130,000 hectares leased from 14 sheep-farming families in Chubut province. Construction is not expected to begin until around 2028. If operated continuously at projected peak demand, the finished campus would consume about 2.7 times as much electricity in a year as the entire city of Buenos Aires used in 2025, according to AP's calculation.
Provincial officials frame this as a windfall. Andrés Arbeletche, cabinet coordination secretary for Chubut, said the province gives nothing up. Residents of nearby Trelew, where environmental studies are still underway and permits remain pending, disagree.
Maybe we'll have water until we're old. But afterward, our children will still be here, and they won't have those resources.
Cristina Gibón, 46, said there is simply too little information to judge the company's assurances, which have not specified water use or how much of the power would come from gas. Her concern is intergenerational: the resource depletion will outlast the investment cycle.
Resistance is building
In Trelew, residents have organized online and in the main square under the banner Trelew Free of Data Centers. In Congress, the opposition has forced Milei to gut a bill easing restrictions on foreign land ownership and has stalled his plan to let AI agents control companies outright, a proposal he calls nonhuman corporations.
Alan Rocha Varsanyi, a researcher with the environmental group Observatorio Petrolero Sur, said the projects have nothing to do with Argentine technological sovereignty.
We're not talking about data centers designed to strengthen Argentine technological sovereignty. The computing capacity will be exported wherever OpenAI or the other companies need it.
Lawmakers recently accused Milei of selling off the country at a hearing on Thiel's interests in Argentina, a sign that the opposition understands the arrangement as a transfer of public resources to private capital rather than neutral investment.
What happens next?
Two forces could slow the project. Pope Leo XIV, who has warned of AI's threats to humanity, is scheduled to visit Argentina next week on his Latin American tour. And some investors are waiting out next year's potentially tight presidential election, fearing a new government could unwind Milei's reforms. Milei's tax incentive bill is still awaiting Senate approval.
Until then, the communities of Chubut are being asked to accept the extraction on faith, with no data on water, no local computing rights and no regulatory recourse. The sheep farmers who leased their land expect to keep grazing alongside the server racks. The rest of Patagonia will carry the costs without holding the controls.
FAQ
What did Javier Milei promise tech companies?
Speaking to the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington in October 2026, Milei promised no regulation of artificial intelligence, alongside a proposed corporate tax cut from 25% to 15% for projects of at least $1 billion.
Where would the Patagonian data centers be built?
The main project is a planned $3 billion Green Capital campus on 130,000 hectares in Chubut province, leased from 14 sheep-farming families, with construction not expected before 2028.
What are residents doing to oppose the projects?
Residents of Trelew have organized under the banner Trelew Free of Data Centers, and Argentina's Congress has stalled Milei's AI corporate governance plan and forced him to withdraw parts of a foreign land ownership bill.