Uruguay's state telecom Antel will build a $70m AI data centre in Canelones, announced on 11 and 12 August after a Council of Ministers meeting, with construction starting in the first quarter of 2027, operation targeted for 2028-29 and roughly 250 direct jobs1.
Antel is state-owned, so the capital, the risk and the eventual capacity all sit with the Uruguayan state, and the facility's purpose follows from that rather than from a tenant's demand curve. Uruguay already runs one of the cleanest grids in the Americas, mostly hydro and wind, which is the asset the country has to sell to compute buyers. Where OpenAI paused a UK site in April rather than commit, Montevideo is committing public money to a build that reaches service at the end of the decade.
At $70m the build is small by the standards of the schemes elsewhere in this briefing, and the 2028-29 operating date puts it several hardware generations out. Neither the chip supply nor the customer base is described in the announcement.
