“The planets have aligned for Argentina to become the world’s fourth AI hub,” declared without restraint Damián Reidel, economic advisor and techno-liberal guru to President Javier Milei, his rhetoric dripping with grandiosity.
On December 20, 2024, from the Casa Rosada, the Argentine government launched its ambitious Nuclear Plan, presented as the cornerstone of its strategy to transform the country into a global node for artificial intelligence. The scene was carefully staged: flanking Milei stood Reidel himself—president of Nucleoeléctrica Argentina S.A.—and Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, recently embroiled in controversy over his diplomatic role in the bombing over Iran.
Libertarian paradise of minimal ethical constraints
Although there is little information available, the plan appears to be straightforward: power the growing demands of AI data centers with nuclear energy and offer tech giants unbeatable conditions—cold climate, skilled talent, and lax regulatory frameworks—to establish their infrastructures here.
The chosen reactor, the ACR-300, is a modular Argentine design developed by the state-owned company INVAP, more efficient and economical than traditional large-scale reactors. The plan also includes developing an uranium value chain for export. Everything seems to point toward a high-tech, modern, and energy-abundant Argentina.
The Nuclear Plan promises the construction of these modular reactors within five years. Yet in reality, not a single brick has been laid—nor does Argentina currently possess the necessary equipment to achieve such an ambitious goal. Nuclear experts have publicly ridiculed the proposed timeline as pure fantasy, condemning the project as a populist illusion—one designed to legitimize the ongoing dismantling of Argentina’s scientific infrastructure.
The tech guru behind this project is Reidel, who currently heads NA-SA, Argentina’s state nuclear operator, and manages three active plants. Though trained as a nuclear physicist at the prestigious Balseiro Institute, his career has focused on finance—including JP Morgan Chase—rather than atomic research. Argentine nuclear experts attribute the plan’s unrealistic goals to Reidel’s financial background over his scientific experience.
Beyond the spectacle, what was revealed was a doubly paradoxical wager: on one hand, a return to the nationalist developmentalist imaginary through atomic energy; on the other, an attempt to inscribe this project within the deregulated, extractivist, and subordinated logic of the new libertarian regime. Reidel puts it bluntly: Argentina’s comparative advantage lies not only in its resources or human capital but—above all—in its political willingness to eliminate regulations.
In his view, Argentina’s true asset is its capacity to offer itself to the world as a libertarian paradise—a sacrifice zone with low wages, scant labor and environmental protections, and minimal ethical constraints around AI development. This would position it above other hubs like the European Union, shackled by its environmental and labor laws, or China, where the state maintains ironclad control over data.
What is presented as innovation is, in reality, an acceleration of dependency: energy for export, foreign servers on domestic soil, and skilled labor stripped of strategic autonomy.
This project does not represent a break with the Global South’s technological subordination but its renewal in new forms. Far from building digital sovereignty, Argentina risks cementing its role as a peripheral link in the data economy: an energy generator and provider of favorable conditions for others to process, control, and monetize artificial intelligence.
As with the old extractive enclaves, value addition happens elsewhere. Milei’s gamble, disguised as modernity, repeats the old cycle of dependency, now updated with the buzzwords of cloud computing, algorithms, and computational efficiency.
The Algorithmic Chainsaw
The tensions of this model quickly surface. While a “quantum leap” in nuclear energy is announced, the same government defunds public education, paralyzes scientific research, and fires thousands of workers from the state innovation system.
The ferocity of the attack against universities, science, and research is so brutal that critics call it “scientificide,” alienating even the very scientists who patented the ACR-300 reactor and the workers at INVAP. This chainsaw policy, as some label it, paradoxically dismantles decades of accumulated capabilities—the very foundations that feed the techno-utopian fantasy of turning Argentina into the world’s fourth AI hub and could make local technological development possible.
This AI fantasy of Milei’s government isn’t limited to energy. In June 2024, Milei met with executives from Google, Apple, Meta, and OpenAI to import a “State Digital Reform” model based on implementing Google Distributed Cloud. The plan incorporates the use of big data, machine learning, and algorithmic development for public services, spanning education to healthcare. However, in the context of mass state layoffs, this reform appears less like modernisation and more like algorithmic dismantling.
AI emerges here as the perfect instrument for a reactionary utopia: the self-destructing state, replaced by supposedly “objective” algorithms that eliminate conflict, politics, and democratic deliberation. This reactionary anti-statism lies at the heart of Javier Milei’s discourse, who described his presidential role with the phrase: “I love being a mole inside the State. I’m the one destroying it from within.”
This is more than mere techno-solutionism—it’s a systematic ideological drive to dismantle any social space tied to concepts like social rights, economic regulations, public policy, or democratic deliberation.
Perhaps nowhere was the underlying logic of these techno-utopian fantasies clearer than in the statements of Damián Reidel himself when, before an audience packed with businessmen and investors, he let his unconscious slip: After mentioning Argentina´s multiple advantage for AI investitions, he concluded that “The only problem is that Argentinians populate it,” adding, “…but we’re taking care of that.”
Far from being a bad joke, the phrase symptomatically reflects the ideological core of the plan: turning the country and its people into a sacrifice zone for subaltern techno-utopian fantasies.
Lithium Dreams and Subaltern Nightmares
This techno-utopian vision is intimately tied to the old extractivist dream, which Milei shares with liberals and much of the Latin American centre-left. In this extractivist imaginary, lithium occupies a privileged place as the new fetish of the post-fossil era. This white, crystalline material enables the miracle of batteries capable of storing high energy densities in portable devices.
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Because of this, it embodies capitalism’s fantasy of infinity, promising to keep the machine of consumption, accumulation, and speed running at all costs, even after fossil fuels vanish and the climate collapses. Once oil reserves are depleted within the next 50 years, lithium-ion batteries suggest that business can continue as usual, without incurring the ecological costs or making any concessions.
Around 2011, the narrative of the so-called “Lithium Triangle” gained popularity as a new El Dorado that would bring abundance to countries plagued by endemic economic crises. The Lithium Triangle is the region encompassing the salt flats of Hombre Muerto in Argentina, Uyuni in Bolivia, and the Atacama Desert in Chile, which holds approximately 70% of the world’s lithium reserves. There, mineral extraction is wrapped in an aesthetic of purity: vast white expanses, evaporation ponds, flowing water, crystalline dust, and deserts devoid of people.
Against black, dirty oil, lithium is presented as a white and clean alternative. Although lithium is extracted from rocks through open-pit mining with monumental water usage, the image presented when discussing this mineral is the crystalline, sterilised, desert-like landscape of the salt flats, suggesting a harmonious fusion of technology, capitalism, and nature.
But behind this pristine imaginary lie less shiny realities: massive water consumption in arid zones, territorial disputes with local and indigenous communities, and production that, despite resource abundance, doesn’t represent a market comparable in scale to oil.
In Argentina, Milei’s government has pushed a radical deepening of the extractivist model. The 2024 Land Law and the Incentive Regime for Major Investments (RIGI) consolidate a legal framework that subordinates territorial and environmental rights to the interests of transnational capital.
Designed with blatant short-term logic, this legislative package creates an exceptional regime for mining and energy projects exceeding $200 million, offering unprecedented benefits: thirty-year tax stability, currency exemptions, and a 10-point reduction in profit taxes.
The mechanism is as simple as it is alarming: companies have a four-year window (two initial, plus two extendable) to join this system, freeing them from virtually all constraints. The result is mining without effective oversight, explicitly renouncing extraordinary rents and prohibiting any policy that might limit investors’ absolute control over production.
This isn’t just about economic incentives—it’s the deliberate construction of extractive enclaves disconnected from the national economy, perfectly aligned with the libertarian ideology that led Milei to declare during his campaign: “A company has the right to pollute a river if it so decides.”
Beyond the Libertarian Techno-Utopianism
The combination of AI and extractivism—nuclear energy to power data centres, lithium to feed batteries—forms a model of subordinated modernisation. The rhetoric of technological leapfrogging coexists with the hollowing out of the very state and scientific capacities needed to sustain it.
There is no autonomous AI development without investment in education, science, industry, and public policy. And there is no just energy transition without regulation, redistribution, and planning. In this context, Milei’s government embodies in extreme form a tension that cuts across Latin America: the contradiction between the promise of technological modernity and the structures of dependency it reproduces.
The paradox cuts deep: cries of “energy sovereignty” serve only to tighten the chains of geopolitical dependence, while proclamations of a “digital revolution” erect new corporate enclaves. Lithium, reactors, and AI as mirages of progress – dazzling facades obscuring a reality of growing inequality, poverty and ecological ruin.
As Latin America becomes a testing ground for this toxic triad of libertarian economics, authoritarian governance, and technological fetishism, the path forward demands nothing less than reclaiming technology from exclusionary visions. True innovation must be democratised, harnessed not for corporate plunder but for liberation – aligning technological advancement with social justice, environmental stewardship, and genuine political freedom.
