The cost of AI is being paid in deserts far from Silicon Valley

When Sonia Ramos was a child, she witnessed an accident that would shape the rest of her life. She was born into a mining family in Chile. Her father worked for an American copper company; she grew up among the children of the other workers. In 1957, a part of the Chuquicamata mine collapsed, killing several people and injuring dozens more. Though her father was spared, she remembers watching the wretchedness of the aftermath unfold around her: affected families spiraling into abject poverty, children wasting away from hunger. Four decades later, as Ramos began to protest mining, becoming one of the most active and outspoken Indigenous voices in Chile shining a light on its social, cultural, and environmental destruction, she would remember the lessons she learned in the tragedy: The mining industry is a system, and that system, left to its own devices, will seek profit at any cost. “The worker doesn’t exist,” she says. None of the victims received any ceremony or commemoration; none of their families received compensation. “In that place, there is no humanity.”

Chile is the world’s largest producer of copper, accounting for a quarter of the global supply. Since the beginning, copper mining has reshaped not just the land but the societies that rely on it. Sometimes the effects are visible: Chuquicamata today is the largest open-pit copper mine in the world, a gaping wound in the earth that explosives regularly deepen. That displaced rock, piled up in towering mountains that monumentalize the cavities they came from, is slowly burying the remains of a town that was abandoned after the copper mining began to swallow it. The mining has also drained the region of water to process the copper. At one point a foreign multinational corporation consumed so much water it depleted an entire basin in a nearby salt flat, or salar, destroying its rich eco-system.

Less visible are the trails of arsenic that the industry leaves in the air and water, which has increased rates of cancer throughout the north of the country, and the ways mining has restructured Indigenous life and sowed divisions among different communities. With their lands depleted of water and minerals, the Atacameños, the name that ties together all of the distinct Indigenous groups who share this region, can no longer sustain themselves by growing their own crops or raising their own livestock. The shift has plunged their towns into deep poverty. Crime has risen along with depression, alcoholism, and delinquency. They don’t have enough food, running water, proper health care, or educational resources, having seen little benefit from the billions in profits that their land has generated for someone else. Instead, many are forced to work for the very industry that seized their territories and receive health care from the small clinics it sponsors. Where there was once greater unity among them, the Indigenous groups now squabble over diminishing resources.

Lithium is a more recent discovery there, stumbled upon by an American company in the 1960s as it searched for the water it needed for copper mining. When it drilled into the salares, it found high concentrations of lithium floating in an oily brine beneath the surface, opening up a new front of extraction and accelerating the depletion of more ecosystems. Today Chile produces roughly a third of the world’s lithium, second only to Australia. The material is primarily extracted out of the Salar de Atacama, the largest salt flat in the country, by pumping its brine out into shimmering pools of turquoise and waiting for the sun to evaporate and crystallize the solution into lithium and other by-products. The salares were once home to flocks of pink flamingos, which the Atacameños consider their spiritual siblings. Now the flamingos are gone; the young daughter of one Indigenous leader in the Peine community has only her ancestors’ stories and a flamingo plushie by which to remember them.

Over the years, the Atacameños have heard many narratives used to justify all of this extraction. In 2022, as the European Union set new policies around the energy transition and the demand for lithium skyrocketed, both companies and politicians in Chile and the rest of the world lauded the importance of the country’s mining industry in propelling forward a better future. Indigenous communities watching their land and their communities get ripped apart asked: A better future for whom? “Local people never have the ability to think about their own destiny outside the forces of economics and international politics,” says Cristina Dorador, a microbiologist who lives in the north and studies its rich biodiversity.

Now the same narratives are being recycled with generative AI. The accelerated copper and lithium extraction to build megacampuses—and to build the power plants and thousands more miles of power lines to support them— is, in Silicon Valley’s account, also ushering in a better and brighter future. To block that extraction is thus to block fundamental progress for humanity. But it is not the mining that Indigenous communities resist. “Our ancestors were miners,” says Ramos. They were the ones who discovered the copper in the first place. The problem, she says, is the scale.

That scale has consumed everything. It has made the north and the rest of Chile completely dependent on the industry and not allowed for the emergence of other economies. It has choked off the country’s—and the rest of the world’s— ability to imagine different paths where development could exist without plundering natural resources, Ramos says. 

By enabling the production of massive generative AI models, that scale has also led to the perpetuation of racist stereotypes about the Indigenous peoples already suffering from how the technology was physically built. In Brazil, a 2023 art exhibition coproduced by a Chilean university showed the vast chasm between the reality of Latin America’s rich Indigenous cultures and the woefully bereft depictions of them spit out by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion as primitive, technologically inept peoples.

In recent years, the Atacameños have mounted more and more resistance. They fly black flags on their houses to denounce the exploitation of their lands and their community. They’ve organized protests to physically block the roads that company buses and trucks must take to get to the mines. They’ve contracted lawyers to assert their legal rights as Indigenous peoples under international law, which protects their cultural and territorial sovereignty. As companies and the Chilean government have been forced to invite them to negotiations, central to Indigenous demands are the need for the government to conduct research into the health of the Atacama Desert’s ecosystems and to quantify the water loss and any irreparable damage.

Ramos, too, has her own foundation, bringing together “the ancestral and non-ancestral,” she says, to promote and conduct scientific research into the natural wealth that the Atacama Desert has to offer. Due to its uniquely extreme conditions, it is home to many microbial communities—potentially useful for medicines or new sources of energy—that don’t exist anywhere else. For the same reasons, the desert has also been studied for decades as an analogue to Mars’s climate. Ramos hopes that any discoveries will help prove the value of preserving her beautiful homeland. Against the narratives of high-speed progress used to fuel extraction, she searches for new conceptions of progress that promote healing, sustainability, and regeneration.