Draining cities dry: the giant tech companies queueing up to build datacentres in drought-hit Latin America

In Brazil, the Chinese social media giant TikTok is said to be the latest company planning a supercomputer warehouse that will use vast amounts of water and energy

It is a warehouse the size of 12 football pitches that promises to create much-needed jobs and development in Caucaia city, north-east Brazil. But it won't have shelves stocked with products. This vast building will be a datacentre, believed to be earmarked for TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app, as part of a 55bn reais (7.3bn) project to expand its global datacentre infrastructure.

As the demand for supercomputer facilities rises, fuelled by the AI boom, Brazil is attracting more and more tech companies. The choice of Caucaia is no accident. Several undersea cables carry data from the nearby capital of Ceara state, Fortaleza, to other continents. The closer to the cables, the greater the traffic capacity and the lower the latency, or response time, between two points on the internet network.