Argentina built a nuclear capability over generations: its own reactor design, its own uranium, its own trained specialists. Watch how a government elected to shrink the state used the language of freedom to hand almost all of it to a small private circle, and to the machines now hungry for the world’s energy and minerals.
The Extraction Zone: How Argentina’s Nuclear Future Was Sold
Argentina spent more than a decade designing and building a reactor of its own. By September 2024, the CAREM plant stood roughly 85 per cent finished, its 200-tonne pressure vessel already under construction, the first reactor vessel of its kind ever made on Argentine soil. Then the work stopped. Hundreds of contractors were sent home, and a reactor the country had almost completed was left to sit while the government spoke of a new nuclear age built with private money instead.
The word attached to all of this was freedom. Freedom from a bloated and predatory state, from public waste, from a government that did too much. What followed was the transfer of a national capability, decades of design, manufacturing, uranium and trained specialists, into a small circle of private and largely foreign hands, under terms locked in for thirty years, and folded into a wider effort to secure the raw materials for artificial intelligence. The dismantling was narrated as liberation, and that framing did work that policy could not.
The reactor they stopped
CAREM is a small modular reactor: a compact design meant to be built in factory-made sections and assembled on site, rather than poured as a single bespoke structure. The appeal is sovereignty as much as it is scale. A country that can build one can build many, and can do so mostly with its own industry. Up to 70 per cent of CAREM’s components were to be made in Argentina. International assessors counted it among only seven small modular reactor designs anywhere in the world to have reached construction, and one of just four licensed to build before 2025.
Stopping it was a deliberate choice. Around 470 contractor jobs went almost at once. The national atomic energy body, CNEA, saw its budget fall by 42 per cent in real terms between 2023 and 2025; by one count, 571 scientists and technicians were gone. A further round of cuts in 2026 removed dozens more, including specialised CAREM technicians. A former CNEA president estimated that 40 per cent of the people assigned to the reactor had resigned or been pushed out, many of them recruited by a private company preparing a rival reactor nearby.
A hostile takeover?
While the public reactor lost its people, a different nuclear plan took shape, this one designed around private capital from the start. Its architect, Demian Reidel, was a former JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs banker who came to hold several of the most powerful positions in the country’s nuclear and technology policy at once: chair of the nuclear council, president of the state operator that runs Argentina’s three power plants, and adviser to the president on artificial intelligence. “This is my baby,” he said of the plan.
It had three stages. First, privately financed 300-megawatt modular reactors. Second, uranium mined for export. Third, a “Nuclear City” in Patagonia where reactor power would feed data centres for artificial intelligence. Reactors, uranium and computing, linked in a unified design, and all of it built to be owned and financed from outside the public system that had created the knowledge to do it in the first place.
Then came Stargate. In October 2025, weeks before midterm elections, the government presented a Patagonian data centre backed by OpenAI and a little-known local company, Sur Energy, all for the bargain price of 25 billion dollars. OpenAI had signed only a letter of intent, and was expected mainly to buy computing capacity rather than fund construction. Sur Energy, with no visible record of delivering anything on that scale, would have to assemble the companies, the infrastructure and the money. Seven months on, the project had no confirmed site, no disclosed financing and no named builder, and had not even been submitted to the country’s own investment regime. A twenty-five-billion-dollar announcement described a possibility, not a commitment.
The name will ring a bell for anyone who has followed the stranger corners of intelligence history, where “Stargate” once labelled a United States programme researching remote viewing. This is not that. Here it is simply the name OpenAI gives its data-centre build-out.
Even on its own terms, the promise was thin. Data centres employ thousands during construction and, as one of Sur Energy’s own founders admitted, only about a hundred people once running. They are “not a direct source of employment,” he said. The country would supply land, water, power and regulatory privilege. The jobs would leave when the builders did.
The lock
Before most of these projects had substance, a mechanism to protect them was already in place. The Large Investment Incentive Regime, known by its Spanish acronym RIGI, offers major investors reduced taxes, exemption from duties on imported equipment, the right to keep export earnings abroad, and a guarantee that the core tax, customs and currency terms will not change for thirty years. A proposed enhanced version would cut the headline tax rate further for the largest projects.
The sequence tells you what was prioritised. Stargate was announced as a national economic event before it had a builder or a budget, yet the framework capable of shielding its investors for three decades was ready and waiting. Securing the terms for future private owners moved faster than establishing whether the thing itself could be built. American and Canadian capital was already circling Argentine uranium through the same regime, with moves underway to extend the same benefits to rare earths.
One ring to rule them all?
The people who shaped these policies had other ambitions. Reidel ran the state nuclear operator, prepared it for partial privatisation, then left and founded his own private nuclear venture, whose sales pitch draws directly on the authority and access he gathered in office, though he has never built or run the kind of plant it proposes. He resigned amid an internal complaint alleging grossly inflated contracts at the state company, including software billed at ten times its original budget. He denied the allegations and asked for an investigation. Seven weeks later, he was back inside the presidential palace for a meeting with the visiting US senator Rand Paul.
He was not alone. The country’s ambassador to Washington, who signed Argentina into the US resource alliance, had sat on the same presidential advisory council as Reidel and served on the board of an entrepreneurs’ network, Endeavor. The public face of Stargate belonged to that network too. The same institution quietly connected the man fronting the data centre and the man signing the mineral pacts, two projects resting on the same combination of energy, minerals and computing.
The handover of hardware ran in parallel. Early in 2025, the government transferred its controlling stake in IMPSA, a nuclear manufacturer with four decades of experience and a hand in CAREM itself, to a US-led consortium for a modest capital commitment and a debt restructuring. Its buyers were tied to the political network returning to power in Washington. Its new leadership spoke openly of finishing the CAREM pressure vessel with private money and selling the expertise gained on the public project to reactor firms around the world. Knowledge financed and classified by the Argentine state now had an international price tag.
Pax Silica
In December 2025, Washington launched Pax Silica, an alliance built to organise the resources artificial intelligence depends on: critical minerals, energy, semiconductors, data centres and computing power. Argentina, with uranium, lithium, copper, rare earths, nuclear skill and vast Patagonian land, could supply much of the foundation. It signed on in mid-2026.
How it signed on is the troubling part. The full text of the agreement was neither published nor put before Congress, according to a formal request filed by lawmakers. Here’s the divide: Argentina’s constitution gives its provinces original ownership of the natural resources within their borders, but the provinces whose uranium and energy were being pledged had no public account of what had been promised in their name, or who would decide the terms.
Here, the evidence needs care. No public document names Stargate as a Pax Silica project, and there is no proof of a contract binding them. What connects them is the pattern rather than a signature. Reidel’s plan tied reactors and uranium to Patagonian data centres. RIGI offered the thirty-year protection to draw the investors. Pax Silica placed those same assets inside Washington’s strategy for artificial intelligence. Each piece is documented on its own; the link between them is the shape they make together. Argentina also made no public commitment to exclude Chinese capital, leaving itself room to court both sides of the same rivalry.
What cannot be exported
One executive on the private side described the arrangement with unusual candour. Argentina would enter the market, he said, “not as an equal. As a supplier.”
That is the whole model in six words. Uranium becomes an export. Public expertise becomes a private asset. Territory and electricity become inputs for a data centre whose owner and financing the government will not name. What Argentina keeps are the costs that cannot be shipped abroad: the strain on its water and power, the upkeep of public infrastructure, the scientists and technicians lost, and the burden carried by the communities living above the resources everyone else wants.
This is where Argentina stops being only a national story. Artificial intelligence runs on physical things, on enormous quantities of electricity, water for cooling, minerals for hardware, and land for the sheds full of machines. Wherever those things are placed, the same offer is being made, dressed in the same vocabulary. Open your resources. Loosen your rules. Lock in the terms for a generation. Call the surrender of control an opportunity, and the enclosure of public wealth a liberation. An “extraction zone” is more than a place with uranium or rare earths under it. It is a place persuaded to give up its own leverage while believing it has been set free.
The reactor still stands unfinished at the water’s edge, a monument to a capability the country had and was talked out of keeping. Milei called the programme freedom. In practice, freedom meant that the power to decide Argentina’s future moved somewhere its people cannot easily reach, while the bill for it stayed at home.
Full Article: 21st Century Wire
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