Territory, extractivism and AI
The cloud has a geography
From a private refuge in the Andes to a new oil frontier around the Malvinas, the Southern Cone is once again gaining value as a reserve territory. Land, water, copper, lithium, cellulose, gas and oil sustain global economies and a digital future that is often represented as immaterial. Behind the cloud, soil, energy, minerals and the power relations that determine their uses come back into view.
In San Carlos, Mendoza, a 32,000-hectare property is becoming an experiment in the future.
It is called Wamani.
Martín Varsavsky acquired the property in December 2023 together with five other investors from Argentina and the United States. He retains a 50% stake, and by the time the Financial Times visited the project in August 2026, the group had invested close to US$10 million in prefabricated homes, geodesic domes, roads, solar generation, an airstrip and other infrastructure (Financial Times, 2026).
Its purpose is not hidden. Varsavsky presents Wamani as a place capable of maintaining a high degree of autonomy in extreme scenarios, from nuclear war to prolonged disruption of supply chains and major global infrastructures. The project includes food production, its own energy supply and communications systems. Those behind it are even considering downloading language models and running them on solar-powered computers in order to preserve local computing capacity if global servers were to become unavailable (Financial Times, 2026).
Wamani is not a mine.
It is not an oil field.
Nor, in the strict sense, is it an extractive project.
Its interest lies elsewhere. It allows us to observe how territory can be transformed into private resilience infrastructure.
Land.
Water.
Energy.
Food.
Computing.
Distance.
Those with sufficient capital can gather these elements and turn them into a reserve against an uncertain future.
While much of the technological imagination presents the future as increasingly immaterial, some of the people connected to that digital world are seeking protection from its risks through profoundly physical resources.
The cloud, it seems, also needs somewhere to land.
There is another appropriation here, less visible than the 32,000 hectares.
Wamani is not a word invented by the venture.
Ethnographic research published by anthropologist Néstor Taipe records wamani among contemporary Quechua-speaking populations in the central-southern Peruvian Andes as a tutelary figure associated with mountains and high-Andean lakes. Its attributes include the protection of communities, groups, people, livestock and wildlife, as well as a role in articulating local and ethnic identities (Taipe, 2024). The scope of that study matters: it describes specific contexts in central-southern Peru and does not justify attributing a single cosmology to the diversity of the Quechua world.
The project’s own commercial website acknowledges the Andean origin of the term and associates it with territory, province and the figure of a protective mountain spirit. It also links the name to the 5,000-metre peak located within the property (Wamani, n.d.). Varsavsky told the Financial Times that he chose the name in tribute to a Quechua-speaking woman involved in his upbringing (Financial Times, 2026).
Describing that choice directly as a ‘theft’ would require evidence we have not found. The sources consulted do not document a public complaint by a Quechua community or organisation over the use of the name.
What can be verified is a commercial and private recontextualisation.
A word linked, in particular Andean contexts, to mountain, protection, territory and identity becomes the name of a 32,000-hectare refuge designed by a small elite to protect itself from future crises.
The operation is especially significant because it does not merely privatise space. It also incorporates into the project a language and a territorial memory that predate the property’s current owners.
The territory provides land and water.
Culture provides name and meaning.
A short conceptual distance from Wamani lies another way of constructing security.
This time, protection is designed for large investments against future regulatory change.
The Large Investment Incentive Regime, or RIGI, was created by Law 27,742 in 2024. One of its central provisions is a guarantee of tax, customs, foreign-exchange and regulatory stability for 30 years from the date each project joins the regime (Congreso de la Nación Argentina, 2024).
The announced scale grew quickly. By May 2026, the RIGI Observatory, directed by Mariano Novas, counted 36 submitted projects worth more than US$106.104 billion. Thirty were exclusively in extractive sectors: twenty mining projects and ten linked to hydrocarbons. At that cut-off point, fifteen projects had been approved, worth US$29.025 billion (Novas, 2026).
A few days later, the Ministry of Economy launched its official platform with another time cut-off: 16 approved projects worth US$29.892 billion and 25 still under assessment, worth US$111.037 billion (Ministerio de Economía, 2026a).
By the end of July, approval of Liex’s lithium project in Catamarca brought the number of initiatives incorporated into the regime to 21, with declared commitments exceeding US$46.7 billion. Liex’s accession was formalised through Ministry of Economy Resolution 1153/2026 (Loustalot, 2026; Ministerio de Economía, 2026b).
The succession of figures is not a statistical anomaly. It shows why categories that are often conflated in public debate need to be separated.
An announced project is not a submitted project.
A submitted project is not necessarily an approved one.
An approved project is not yet the same as executed investment.
And a committed sum does not by itself show how much value will remain in the territory.
An article by Sebastián Premici published in El Destape on 23 June 2026, one of the starting points for this research, focused precisely on that gap between investment promises and their effects on employment, suppliers, economic activity and public investment (Premici, 2026).
Neuquén, San Juan, Río Negro, Catamarca and Salta recur across that map, together with Vaca Muerta, copper, lithium, liquefied natural gas and the infrastructure needed to transport them.
Debate about development begins here: how much stable employment is produced, what technological capacity remains, which local suppliers develop, how rents are distributed, what happens to water, and how much room a community or a future government retains to alter the conditions of extraction after granting three decades of stability.
RIGI also contains a detail directly relevant to this article. A regulatory amendment in February 2026 explicitly included artificial intelligence among the activities covered by the regime’s technology sector (Poder Ejecutivo Nacional, 2026).
Mining, oil, gas and artificial intelligence thus appear within the same architecture for attracting large-scale investment.
Political predictability can also become part of what a territory offers to capital.
The same mountain range, different ways of securing territory
RIGI’s legal security ends at an administrative border that ecosystems do not recognise.
On the other side of the Andes lie the same salt flats, basins, minerals and water systems that make the mountain range strategically important.
Argentina and Chile share this geography, but they organise the relationship between state, capital and resources differently.
Copper has structured a substantial part of the Chilean economy for decades. Lithium now adds another dimension.
In the Salar de Atacama, Codelco and SQM formally established NovaAndino Litio in December 2025, a public-private partnership intended to carry out exploration, extraction, production and marketing activities until 2060. Codelco holds 50% plus one share, giving the state a majority stake (Codelco, 2025).
The arrangement differs from Argentina’s.
Chile is seeking to increase state participation in a resource deemed strategic while retaining a partnership with private capital.
That does not make the materiality of the process disappear.
Lithium needs salt flats.
Copper needs mines.
Both require water, electricity, processing plants, roads and ports.
The energy transition does not eliminate extraction. It changes some of what becomes strategically important to extract.
This geography of resources cannot be separated from disputes over territory, property and autonomy.
In southern Chile, Mapuche territorial claims unfold across spaces profoundly transformed by generations of private property, forestry expansion and state policies.
Since February 2025 there has also been a new legal framework against terrorism. Law 21,732, promulgated on 4 February and published on 12 February 2025, expressly repealed Law 18,314, adopted during the dictatorship. The new law regulates terrorist association and expands the use of special investigative techniques, including communications interception and other tools already present in the Code of Criminal Procedure (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile, 2025).
It would be inaccurate to present this law as legislation specifically directed against the Mapuche people, or to automatically turn every territorial conflict into a terrorism issue. These are separate planes requiring separate empirical analysis.
Its presence in a regional radiography nevertheless reveals another dimension of territory: the same space can simultaneously be home, collective memory, private property, economic resource, mineral reserve and claimed territory.
The authority to decide which of those meanings prevails is never purely technical.
Uruguay and the enclave that works
Uruguay offers a different contrast.
It has no Vaca Muerta and no major lithium salt flats. Nor does it have copper mining comparable with Chile’s.
Its major territorial transformation of recent decades advanced in a visually less spectacular way.
Tree by tree.
UPM’s Fray Bentos mill has operated since 2007. Montes del Plata, founded in Uruguay by Chilean Arauco and Swedish-Finnish Stora Enso, operates its industrial complex in the department of Colonia (Montes del Plata, n.d.).
UPM’s second Uruguayan mill, Paso de los Toros, began production in April 2023. It has capacity for approximately 2.1 million tonnes of eucalyptus pulp per year, and the US$3.47 billion investment included the mill, a port terminal and local infrastructure. According to the company’s own estimates, its Uruguayan value chain generates around 7,000 direct jobs and 10,000 induced jobs; these are corporate figures and should be read as such (UPM, 2023).
There is no confirmed ‘UPM III’.
Nor is one needed to understand the scale already reached.
In July 2024, cellulose displaced beef as Uruguay’s leading export item, a position consolidated again in September that year. Uruguay XXI linked that growth, among other factors, to the start-up of Paso de los Toros (Uruguay XXI, 2024).
This case requires care with the concept of enclave.
Cellulose is surrounded by jobs, suppliers, railways, roads, ports and significant logistical integration.
There are also less visible ecological transformations.
A study carried out on seven experimental Eucalyptus plots in Uruguay found that vegetation intercepted between 14% and 30% of total precipitation in first-rotation or replanted plantations, reaching a maximum of 50% in an unmanaged coppice plot (Alonso et al., 2023).
That result does not mean river basins automatically lose 14% to 50% of their flow. Canopy interception and catchment discharge are different hydrological measures.
What matters is that forestry transformation alters measurable components of the water balance.
Uruguay’s model is especially significant because it shows that territorial reorganisation of an extractive kind does not require collapsed institutions.
It can develop through contracts, environmental regulation, certification, public investment, railways and a stable democracy.
Extractivism can generate conflict.
It can also become institutionalised.
That transformation is now extending seawards.
In October 2024, Chevron took over operation of offshore block OFF-1 with a 60% stake, while Challenger Energy Group retained 40% (ANCAP, 2024).
During the first season of the 3DUR26 seismic campaign, 1,400 km² of three-dimensional seismic data were acquired in that block. ANCAP reported that the campaign ended in April 2026 with no recorded environmental or safety incidents, and that a second season is planned for November (ANCAP, 2026b).
The frontier is expanding. In March 2026 QatarEnergy joined OFF-2 and OFF-7, while Chevron also entered OFF-7. The resulting structure left OFF-2 with Shell at 70% and QatarEnergy at 30%; in OFF-7, Shell retains 40%, while QatarEnergy and Chevron each hold 30% (ANCAP, 2026a).
There is still no commercial offshore oil production in Uruguay.
Exploration, discovery, economic viability and extraction are distinct stages.
But the movement reveals a trend.
The South Atlantic is once again being mapped as an energy frontier.
Following that frontier southwards leads to a territory where the transition from exploration to development has already taken place.
Malvinas and the colonial form of the enclave
On 10 December 2025, Navitas Petroleum and Rockhopper Exploration took the final investment decision to develop Sea Lion, north of the Malvinas Islands.
The project thus entered the development phase.
Phase 1 comprises eleven wells — seven oil producers, one gas injector and three water injectors — and aims to recover around 170 million barrels of 2C resources, with an expected peak of around 50,000 barrels per day. First oil is scheduled for 2028 (Rockhopper Exploration, 2025a, 2025b).
The post-FID budget is US$1.8 billion to first oil and US$2.1 billion to project completion (Rockhopper Exploration, 2025a).
The 170 million barrels refer to Phase 1, not to the field as a whole. The independent assessment used by Rockhopper places gross 2C resources for the full field at 917 million barrels. Phase 2 would add a further 149 million barrels to the initial development (Rockhopper Exploration, 2025a).
Navitas controls 65% of the project and operates Sea Lion. Rockhopper holds 35% (Rockhopper Exploration, 2025a).
There is also an earlier development that substantially changes how the project is read from Argentina.
Navitas is sanctioned by the Argentine state.
Energy Secretariat Resolution 240/2022 declared Navitas Petroleum’s hydrocarbon activities on the continental shelf claimed by Argentina illegal under Argentine law. Following the administrative procedure, the Argentine government designated the company as ‘clandestine’ and imposed a 20-year ban on carrying out activities in the country (Secretaría de Energía, 2022).
Argentina’s rejection of Sea Lion is therefore not confined to diplomacy.
There is an administrative sanction that predates the current development.
When Navitas and Rockhopper announced the final investment decision, Argentina’s Foreign Ministry formally rejected the project again on 11 December 2025 and maintained that the licences lacked authorisation from the Argentine authorities (Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Comercio Internacional y Culto, 2025).
Language matters particularly in Malvinas.
The United Nations has kept the islands on its list of Non-Self-Governing Territories since 1946, identifies the United Kingdom as the administering power, and explicitly records the existence of a sovereignty dispute between Argentina and the United Kingdom (United Nations, n.d.).
From the Argentine and Latin American editorial framing adopted here, Malvinas is an occupied colony being exploited through extractive practices while its sovereignty remains unresolved.
That formulation should not be attributed verbatim to the United Nations.
UN terminology refers to a Non-Self-Governing Territory administered by the United Kingdom and to a sovereignty dispute between two states.
Argentina maintains that unilateral exploitation of natural resources is illegitimate. One of the foundations of that position is UN General Assembly Resolution 31/49, adopted in 1976, which calls on both parties to refrain from introducing unilateral modifications to the situation while the process relating to the dispute continues (United Nations General Assembly, 1976; Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Comercio Internacional y Culto, 2025).
The British position is incompatible with that interpretation. The UK government argues that the islands’ current population has a right to self-determination and, in June 2026, explicitly defended its right to develop natural resources for its own economic benefit (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 2026).
Sea Lion turns that divergence into something material.
We are talking about wells, infrastructure, capital, fiscal revenues and oil.
The Environmental Impact Statement for Phases 1 and 2 was submitted by Navitas Petroleum Development and Production Ltd. to the islands’ administration and was subject to public consultation between July and August 2024 (Falkland Islands Government, 2024).
Falklands Conservation participated in the environmental debate, but it did not author the EIS.
The distinction matters. It separates the environmental assessment submitted by the operator from positions later formulated by environmental organisations.
Sea Lion therefore concentrates several layers that elsewhere appear separately.
Sea Lion concentrates sovereignty, capital, energy, carbon and coloniality.
Future oil revenues could also strengthen the administration that controls the disputed territory. The islands’ administration currently applies a 9% royalty on oil production and a 26% corporation tax on taxable profits (Falkland Islands Government, n.d.).
The resource may therefore help finance the political and institutional conditions that allow extraction to continue.
Artificial intelligence also begins underground
All this can seem far removed from a conversation about artificial intelligence.
The distance narrows once its infrastructure is examined.
The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres consumed around 415 TWh of electricity in 2024, approximately 1.5% of global electricity use. For 2030 it projects around 945 TWh, more than double, and identifies the expansion of AI as the principal driver of that growth (International Energy Agency [IEA], 2025).
The local scale helps make that concrete.
According to the IEA, a typical AI-focused data centre consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households. The largest facilities currently under construction could consume twenty times as much (IEA, 2025).
This does not mean that lithium extracted in Argentina or Chilean copper necessarily ends up inside a specific server owned by a particular technology company.
Global supply chains are much more complex.
It means that AI development requires electricity generation, transmission lines, transformers, storage and cooling systems, industrial land and international chains of minerals and components. The IEA itself warns of bottlenecks in grids, transformers and cables as data-centre capacity expands (IEA, 2025).
AI does not live in a cloud. It lives in buildings connected by cables, powered by generating stations, cooled by water or air and supported by networks built from materials, tied to territories that disappear from view when all we see is a screen.
A map without a single extractivism
Argentina, Chile and Uruguay do not represent the same model.
Treating them as interchangeable would erase precisely what an anthropological perspective needs to observe.
Argentina offers large investors extraordinary stability over three decades; Chile is increasing state participation in a strategic resource such as lithium through a public-private partnership; and Uruguay combines foreign investment, public infrastructure, legal certainty and an integrated forestry industry while exploring a new offshore frontier.
Their fiscal frameworks differ.
So do their institutions.
Forms of ownership, state capacities and mechanisms of environmental regulation are not equivalent.
Even extractivism loses analytical value if it is used as a synonym for any activity based on natural resources.
What they share is something else.
A global economy once again looking towards the south of the continent for what it needs to sustain its transformations.
Critical minerals, energy, water, biomass, land, food, space and even refuge.
Abya Yala — the continent in the political designation disseminated by Indigenous movements — has for centuries been represented from centres of power as a territory from which to obtain what is lacking elsewhere. The term is used here without implying that the continent’s extraordinary diversity of peoples, languages, histories and territorial relations can be homogenised.
The novelty may not lie in that gaze.
What changes are the words accompanying each cycle.
Civilisation, progress and development. Now, energy transition, critical minerals, energy security, artificial intelligence, resilience and survival.
Wamani brings us back to the beginning.
A small elite buys 32,000 hectares and gathers land, water, energy, food and computing capacity in order to have a reserve if the world it knows stops functioning.
Even the name comes from an older relationship between mountain, territory, protection and memory.
Meanwhile, entire states reorganise parts of their territories to supply energy and raw materials to the world that is still functioning.
Chile extracts minerals central to the energy transition.
Argentina offers prolonged legal stability to multiply large investments in mining, hydrocarbons and technology.
Uruguay links plantations, mills, railways and ports and is once again exploring its maritime platform.
And in Malvinas, private capital is preparing to extract oil from a territory that the United Nations keeps on its decolonisation agenda and whose sovereignty remains disputed.
They are not identical phenomena.
They do not need to be identical to belong to the same map.
Because when the future begins to be perceived as scarce, what first gains value is not necessarily technology.
It is territory.
While some elites build private reserves against an uncertain future, the Southern Cone risks becoming the material reserve of a future designed elsewhere.
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