Tech companies are scouting Argentine Patagonia for AI data centres, Reuters reports

A stretch of Argentina that mostly exports wind, gas and sheep is being pitched to the companies building AI infrastructure, and some of them are listening.

Developers and energy firms are courting hyperscalers for data centre projects across Patagonia and the surrounding provinces, Reuters reported, with initial agreements targeted by the end of this year and site tours pencilled in for February.

OpenAI signed a letter of intent with the Argentine developer Sur Energy in October 2025 for a Patagonian facility of up to 500MW, announced by President Javier Milei alongside a video appearance by Sam Altman, with expected investment of around $25bn and a first 100MW phase due in 2027.

It is the Latin American entry in the Stargate programme, which also has projects in Norway, the UK and the UAE.

Around it sits a queue of less familiar names. Pampa Energía is proposing a 500MW site in Neuquén powered by Vaca Muerta gas, at an infrastructure cost of about $900m, plus a smaller 30MW first stage at Bahía Blanca.

FlexDomes has a 120MW first stage costed at $1.4bn. Green Capital is planning 300MW in Chubut for $3bn, with ambitions of eventually reaching 3,000MW, and is leasing roughly 1,300 square kilometres of land south of Trelew to build the wind and solar farms to feed it.

Amazon and Alphabet were both named among the companies looking, and Genneia and Vista Energy among the local energy firms involved.

The pitch rests on two resources that rarely sit together. Patagonian wind is among the most consistent onshore resource anywhere, and Vaca Muerta, the shale formation in Neuquén, supplies gas at a price that makes firm baseload plausible.

For workloads where training runs care about electricity rather than latency, being 11,000km from the users matters less than it once did.

The other half of the offer is fiscal. Argentina’s incentive regime for large investments, known as RIGI, grants qualifying projects 30 years of stability on tax, customs and foreign exchange rules, a 25% corporate income tax rate, and the right to repatriate investment without central bank approval.

In May, the government sent Congress a bill for a successor scheme, unofficially the Super RIGI, which names data centres explicitly, raises the entry threshold to $1bn, and cuts the income tax rate to a flat 15%. It has not passed yet.

That is the part worth watching, because the whole proposition is a bet that a 30-year guarantee written in Buenos Aires will still be honoured in year 20. The regime is designed precisely to answer that objection, which is itself an admission of how large the objection is.

The interest is nonetheless new.

“Two years ago, nobody would talk about Argentina,” Steve Sasse, vice president for Latin America at datacenterHawk, told Reuters.

Rubén Turienzo of Pampa Energía said the company had started to detect firmer interest from prospective tenants.

One structural detail separates these proposals from most of the global pipeline. Several are not asking to join a queue for grid capacity at all: Green Capital is building the wind and solar farms that will feed its own site, and Pampa Energía is drawing on gas it already produces.

Generating alongside the load rather than waiting for a transmission connection is a slower way to start and a faster way to finish, and it is one reason developers chasing energy for AI workloads keep ending up in places with more wind than people.

Power alone will not settle it. Hadassa Lutz of the advisory firm Cloud2Ground, noting that developers everywhere are hunting for electricity, told Reuters that “saying you have power is not enough,” with grid connections and connectivity still the practical constraints.

That is the same bottleneck slowing projects in every other market suddenly rich in theoretical capacity.

What is pushing the search offshore is easier to see. AI demand has begun showing up on American electricity bills, including at Rust Belt factories, and the political cost of building at home has risen with it.

Argentina’s own technology sector has spent two decades exporting software rather than hosting it, and none of the announced capacity is running yet.