Atlas Seeks Grid Access for Giant AI Data Center in Water-Stressed Brazilian Town

Atlas Renewable Energy has sought permission to connect a proposed 1-gigawatt AI data center in Paracatu, Minas Gerais, to Brazil’s national power grid. The planned facility would exceed the combined capacity of data centers currently installed in Brazil, putting an unusually large computing project before a water-constrained municipality.

A cooling question without a final design

Data centers are facilities full of servers that store and process information. The equipment produces heat, and water can be crucial for cooling it to prevent failures, lost performance and other operating risks. But Atlas said the project is still in a very preliminary study phase, with no technical decisions made, so its cooling design and water needs have not been settled.

That open question is significant in Paracatu. The president of the Paracatu and Urucuia River Basin Committee said the region has restrictions on both groundwater and surface water. The investigation states that about 80% of the municipality faces water conflicts and that demand already exceeds available groundwater reserves.

Atlas is owned by an arm of BlackRock and already operates solar farms in Paracatu. The company disclosed the data-center plan in a presentation to Brazil’s Energy Ministry while requesting the grid connection.

A large proposal, still at an early stage

Atlas divided the proposed infrastructure into three modules, with partial operations planned for December 2027 and completion by 2030. Those dates remain plans for a proposed facility, rather than a completed site or an approved operating design.

Disclosure has become part of the dispute

Local authorities, residents, farmers and business owners interviewed in Paracatu said they had not been informed of the project before reporters contacted them. That includes the city council president, who learned of the proposal from reporters. The immediate tension is not only the project’s potential resource demands, but when a host community learns enough to assess them.

Brazil has no specific national environmental regulation for data centers, according to the investigation. Mongabay and The Intercept Brasil identified at least 68 planned data centers across 37 Brazilian municipalities, placing Paracatu’s unresolved proposal within a larger pipeline of projects seeking to build computing capacity in the country.