Thursday, 10 September 2026

Atlas Renewable Energy is planning a 1 GW data center in the municipality of Paracatu, Brazil, a single site larger than every data center already operating in the country combined, Mongabay reported.

Installed Brazilian data centers draw around 800 MW in total, according to Mongabay. Atlas Renewable Energy is owned by an arm of the global asset manager BlackRock and already operates solar farms in the municipality, Mongabay reported.

Water is the constraint. Around 80% of Paracatu's territory faces water conflicts, and demand there already exceeds 100% of available groundwater reserves, per Mongabay. Mongabay reported that the project risks depleting fragile Cerrado springs.

Local authorities and residents say they were never consulted about the multi-billion-dollar investment and learned of it only through inquiries from reporters, according to Mongabay.

The Paracatu plan sits inside a much wider buildout. Data analyzed by Mongabay and Intercept Brasil indicate at least 68 data centers are planned across 37 Brazilian municipalities.

Transgrid has put up a "house full" sign for data centres in Sydney and told developers chasing grid connections to look to the regions for spare capacity, according to RenewEconomy.

RenewEconomy describes Transgrid as Australia's biggest transmission company, operating the transmission network known as the backbone of the grid.

The message redirects connection demand away from the Sydney load centre and toward parts of the network where headroom remains, per RenewEconomy.