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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallGoogle announced a US$140 million expansion of its existing data center in Quilicura, near Santiago, on September 12, 2018. The plan called for roughly tripling the site to 11.2 hectares (27.7 acres), with more than 1,000 construction jobs and about 120 permanent positions reported. This is a historical announcement, not a newly announced investment; the available sources confirm that Quilicura remains an operating Google data-center location but do not establish when this specific expansion was completed.
What Google announced in 2018
The investment was for an expansion of Google’s existing Quilicura data center in Chile’s Santiago Metropolitan Region—not for a new site. Google and Chilean officials described the planned campus as roughly three times the facility’s existing size, reaching about 11.2 hectares, or 27.7 acres. The announcement came at an event attended by then-President Sebastián Piñera and government ministers.
Google said the project responded to growing demand for its internet and computing services. Its September 2018 announcement and Chile’s Ministry of Economy account described the planned investment and expansion. The Presidential Press Office statement also reported the projected site scale.
Jobs were projections, not one interchangeable total
Reuters reported more than 1,000 construction jobs and approximately 120 permanent jobs associated with the announcement. Those figures describe different kinds of employment: construction work is temporary, while permanent staffing is smaller. Chile’s Economy Ministry reported more than 200 operating positions. Because the sources give different permanent or operating-job figures, they should be treated as separately attributed estimates rather than combined.
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Quilicura was already operating
Google announced its original Chilean data center in 2012, and the facility became fully operational in January 2015, according to Google’s historical account. In 2018, Google described Quilicura as its only data center in Latin America. That wording concerns the company’s data-center footprint, not every type of Google infrastructure: Google Cloud regions, including one in São Paulo, are a distinct category.
Google’s distributed infrastructure supports services such as Gmail, Search, YouTube, Maps, Waze, Google Cloud applications, and machine-learning workloads. Naming those products does not establish that they were hosted exclusively, or entirely, at Quilicura; online services rely on infrastructure across multiple locations.
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Why Chile mattered to Google
Google presented the expansion as part of a broader investment in Chile’s digital infrastructure. Chile offered a growing digital economy, a comparatively established setting for foreign technology investment, and a geographic position suited to serving users and businesses in the region. The country was also developing renewable electricity, particularly solar generation in the Atacama region.
Connectivity was another part of the picture. Google announced a submarine cable project linking Chile with California in 2018, reinforcing the country’s ambitions as a regional digital hub. For Chile, large technology investments could support economic diversification and technical employment beyond established sectors such as mining and copper; the projected jobs, however, do not by themselves establish the project’s eventual local economic impact.
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What the solar-power claim does—and does not—mean
Google said that beginning in January 2017, electricity used by Quilicura was matched with solar power generated in Chile’s Atacama region, including power associated with the El Romero photovoltaic plant. Google’s 2017 account describes that arrangement. It should not be read as proof that the data center received electricity through a dedicated physical line from that plant.
Renewable-energy matching or procurement is not the same claim as using carbon-free electricity every hour. A data center consumes electricity continuously; an annual or other matching arrangement does not, on its own, show that carbon-free generation supplied the site at each moment. Nor does renewable electricity settle other local questions, including water use, land impacts, grid capacity, transmission, or construction emissions.
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What is known about the site now
Google’s current Quilicura location page lists it as an operating data-center location. A later Google disclosure reports that the site recorded 92% carbon-free energy on an hourly basis in 2024 and consumed 121.8 million gallons of water that year. These are site-level figures for 2024, not specifications or measurements from the 2018 expansion announcement; Google describes them in its Quilicura facts post.
The public sources cited here do not establish a definitive completion date or final built-out specifications for the US$140 million project. They also do not provide the expansion’s final power capacity, IT load, building count, cooling design, or site-level PUE. The 2018 footprint and job figures should therefore be understood as announced project scope and projections, not verified as-built results.
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Quilicura is not the Cerrillos project
Google’s Cerrillos data-center proposal is a separate project in the Santiago area, associated with an estimated US$200 million investment and environmental review beginning around 2020. It is not the Quilicura expansion announced in 2018.
Cerrillos drew scrutiny over water use and the vulnerability of Santiago’s aquifer. In February 2024, Chile’s Second Environmental Court partially overturned or sent back aspects of the environmental approval, requiring fuller consideration of climate-change effects and water-related issues. A Chilean parliamentary research report later noted that Google’s Chilean subsidiary communicated project changes in September 2024. These developments concern Cerrillos and should not be presented as a legal challenge to the 2018 Quilicura expansion. See Mongabay’s account of the controversy and the Chilean parliamentary report.
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