Google to spend $140 million to increase data centre in Chile

SANTIAGO – Google will spend $140 million to expand the tech giant’s sole data centre in Latin America, a development Chile’s president hailed on Wednesday as evidence of the country’s enthusiastic participation in “the fourth industrial revolution.”

The development, announced by Google and Chilean officials, represents the company’s 2nd stage of growth for the data centre in Quilicura, near Santiago, which became completely operational in 2015.
Google said the latest investment will triple the data centre’s size to 11.2 hectares (27.7 acres) and create more than 1,000 fresh jobs in the construction process and 120 new stable jobs.

Google’s latest deal is in addition to the $150 million it spent to build the centre. The company first announced data centre construction plans Chile in 2012, 8 months after it opened offices in the country. Since January of 2017, the data centre has operated completely on solar power from Chile’s Atacama region, Google said.

Edgardo Frias, Google’s general manager in Chile, said the improved infrastructure that came from establishing a data centre in Chile helped the company develop its capacity in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.

“This fresh stage reinforces the promise Google made to the region to ensure that big and small companies, non-profit organisations, students, educators and all users can access key tools in a reliable and rapid way,” Frias said.

In a show of the significance Chile is placing on developing a digital economy to diversify from its dependence on copper, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera attended the event.

He vowed that Chile will be on the forefront of what he called “the current of history” in the machinery revolution.

“What we have to decide is which side are we going to be on: where the new works of the future are created, or where the old works of the past are destroyed,” Pinera said.

Google’s announcement comes among conversations between Chile’s government and rival Amazon.com Inc about its interest to house and mine huge amounts of data generated by the country’s giant telescopes.

Chile and Argentina, 2 of South America’s biggest economies, have been courting investment from the cloud computing and e-commerce company.

Google executives told Reuters they had looked at a number of different countries as a venue to establish Google’s first Latin American data centre and had chosen Chile because of its favourable climate for foreign direct investment, a clear regulatory framework and a good supply of renewable energy resources.