The True Cost of the Chip: Connecting AI’s Unchecked Growth to Land Use, Water Rights, and Indigenous Sovereignty in Chile’s Lithium Triangle

Guangda Liang 

The exponential growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is driving an “AI Mineral Rush” for hardware materials like lithium, essential for data center batteries. However, lithium extraction imposes immense, often obscured, environmental and social costs. This paper investigates these externalities in Chile’s Salar de Atacama, a core region of the “Lithium Triangle.” We connect global AI demand to acute, localized conflicts over water and land rights, which disproportionately threaten Indigenous Lickanantay communities. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines geospatial analysis, hydrological data, and supply chain reporting, we quantify the “true cost of the chip” by calculating the embodied water footprint of AI infrastructure. Our findings reveal a direct link between the tech industry’s growth and the accelerated depletion of fragile water resources in one of the world’s driest regions. We argue that corporate sustainability claims create a critical accountability gap by ignoring these upstream realities. The paper concludes with policy recommendations to embed supply chain transparency and environmental justice into global technology governance.