QUILI.AI

Residents of Quilicura, Chile, a hub for AI data centers in the Maipo River Basin, staged a campaign in which locals acted as "human AI" for a day—answering prompts and creating content manually with local artists—to highlight the water consumed by data center cooling amid a drought expected to last until 2040. The initiative, tied to the QUILI.AI project, aims to make visible the hidden water costs of AI use in distant markets such as New York and Berlin. It matters because the campaign reframes AI's resource footprint as a local water-security issue in one of Chile's key agricultural basins. What to watch next is whether the visibility effort translates into pressure on data center operators and regulators over water use and disclosure in the region.