The data center that is not in state procurement

A data center this size moves civil works, power, water, roads and permits. If the State had bought any of it, it would be in the procurement record. We searched by the company named in the environmental file — Eleanor Applications S.R.L., not "Google" — by the park's name, by the road and kilometre, and by tenders mentioning a data center at that location.

There is nothing. Zero as supplier, zero as buyer, zero tenders. And the zero is correct: this is not public works. It is a private investment inside a free zone, so the State does not pay for it. It does something else: it exempts it from taxes, authorises the land use, approves the environmental impact and sells it electricity.

The obvious next question is infrastructure: someone has to bring the electricity. We searched for that too. The power utility does have substation awards in the period — the largest, 141 million pesos to Montelecnor in January 2026 — but none mentions Ciudad de la Costa, Nicolich, Pando or Route 101, so we cannot attribute any of them to the project. And the official summary explains it: the electrical substation is built by the project, not by the State.

So this investigation is not looking for a purchase. It looks for the public decisions that made it possible, all of them published and almost never read together.

The IAR summary is the document the file publishes so anyone can understand the project without reading 104 pages. The concrete facts are there: the site is 32.5 hectares; stage one takes 26 months of works and there are 32 more months to the last stage; between 300 and 400 people will work on it, peaking at 800; and in operation, fifty. Also that the project builds its own electrical substation and will have diesel generators for outages.

What that summary does not carry are the two figures the project was argued over: how much water and how much energy it consumes. The first has a known explanation — the original project foresaw 7,600 cubic metres of drinking water a day, it was reformulated after the 2023 drought and cooling is now air-based. The second does not: the electricity demand the press attributes to a technical report in the file, 560 gigawatt-hours a year and about 48 megawatts, does not appear in the summary the State publishes to explain the project.

We are not saying it is hidden: it may well be in the 104 pages of the full report, whose PDF has broken encoding and which we could not read. We are saying the document written for citizens to understand the project omits the number that defines its impact.

While the country's largest data center is built tax-free, the State pays someone else to keep its own data. The corpus holds 16 awards for data-center hosting, worth 102.5 million pesos, from eleven public bodies: the Presidency, the Prosecutor General, the tax office, the casinos directorate, the social development ministry, the water utility, the power utility, the technological university, the Colonia city government.

Almost all of it is billed by ANTEL — 75.8 million — a state-owned company with its own data center, the Ing. José Luis Massera, in the Pando Technological Industrial Park: same department and same Route 101 as Google's, a few kilometres away. Across all its lines, ANTEL billed the State 4,614 million pesos in 1,138 contracts with 99 public bodies.

Comparing the two buildings sets the scale. The State's was built for about 50 million dollars, has 12,000 square metres and 12 megawatts. Google's is announced at over 850 million and the press attributes to it a demand of about 48 megawatts: four times the power of the country's sovereign data center, in private hands and tax-free.

There is nothing irregular in that: it is the State buying itself a service it needs. What the contrast shows is where each one stands on the same ground: one pays to host its data, the other settles in tax-exempt to host the world's.