In Pecos County, Texas, Amazon is building a 7.65-gigawatt gas plant with 35 turbines (larger than any gas plant operating in the United States) dedicated entirely to powering an artificial intelligence data center that will not even connect to the state power grid. The finding comes from Cleanview, which cross-referenced building permits, the air emissions permit and a July 24 satellite image, and published it in Distilled; Amazon confirmed the project, and The New York Times published its own version on August 8.
The permit authorizes emitting more than 30 million tons of CO2 a year (33 million according to the figure reported by the Times), more than any other single source in the country and more than double the largest U.S. coal plant. And it is not an isolated case: Cleanview counts nearly 60 comparable off-grid dedicated generation projects announced since early 2025, for some 90 gigawatts in total. It is a change of scale in how the energy problem for AI is being solved, and it is happening outside the usual mechanisms of electricity planning.
For Latin America, this matters for a reason that is not environmental but strategic. Chile, Brazil and Colombia compete to attract compute with a recurring argument: a clean electricity mix, available capacity, a good regulatory climate. This case shows that when the grid falls short, the hyperscaler does not move to another country: it builds its own fossil-fuel plant next to the warehouse. The question that almost no regional tender is asking today is who generates the data center’s electricity and in which emissions inventory it is recorded.
Also today
- Evo 2 designs complete virus genomes that work — Sixteen bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) designed by a generative model succeeded in killing E. coli. It is the first published case of a model designing functional organisms from scratch, and the only filter between that sequence and its physical printing in DNA is still voluntary.
- Brazil’s electoral court signs an agreement with ElevenLabs against voice cloning — A list of protected voices for candidates and officials, eight days before the campaign begins. It works as long as fraudsters use that platform and not an open model.
- Alibaba plans to charge large commercial users of Qwen a percentage of revenue — If the two most capable Chinese open models require a commercial agreement above a certain level of revenue, what really remains open is using them, not building a business on top of them.
- One in five U.S. workers says AI does work they used to delegate to another person — Epoch AI’s survey with Ipsos measures substitution, not just adoption. The word that carries the weight of the finding for the region is contractor: no one is measuring how many outsourced assignments stop coming in.
- Latin America barely shows up in the medal table of the International Olympiad in AI — The school competition ended in Astana. Brazil screened 965,000 applicants to send four students, Venezuela came back with an honorable mention and Russia won for the third year in a row.
- OpenAI buys NextSlide and adds its team to ChatGPT — Undisclosed amount, and a deal closed months ago: we found out through the founder’s LinkedIn post. Generating presentations has stopped being a business and has become a feature.
In the region
Two moves, both more about institutional continuity than new rules. In Colombia, the government of Abelardo De La Espriella took office, and with it Alexandra Falla Zerrate as ICT minister, with six declared priorities that include artificial intelligence, digital sovereignty and mass training of young people in programming and data science. The country comes to this change with a CONPES document on AI in force, a bill under consideration and the memorandum with Chile on Latam-GPT, so what is at stake is not a new policy but whether the existing ones survive. In Brazil, the Superior Electoral Court signed a memorandum with ElevenLabs (with no transfer of funds, in force until the end of the year) that creates a list of protected voices, commits support to investigations into manipulated audio generated on that platform and integrates voice tools into the Electoral Assistant for voters with visual impairments and low digital literacy. The campaign begins on August 16. And for anyone working in the public sector, a useful publication that went somewhat unnoticed: the Guide for implementing artificial intelligence projects in the public sector 2026, from ECLAC with German Cooperation, 57 pages in Spanish published in July.
If the argument the region uses to compete for compute (clean energy, available capacity, a good regulatory climate) stops mattering because the buyer builds its own plant next to the data center, what does a Latin American country have left to negotiate with? And does it still make sense to compete in isolation, instead of setting common conditions?
About this entry. It is generated automatically from public sources, without human review before publication. It may contain errors of interpretation or summary; please check each story against its original source (the links lead there) before citing it or making decisions based on it.
Doble Click is written with Anthropic models.