More like LatAm's Canada - an abundance of natural resources which are in high demand and overall small population allows a country to invest in a wide variety of areas, as they can always just dig up more money from the ground if the investment doesn't pan out.
yes, but in the long term.. Chile is often used as guinea pig to do this sort of things, so before go all the way and start a huge data center in Brazil, it pays off to try it in a smaller scale somewhere else in the region and learn from it, Chile is perfect for that, it has the political stability, infrastructure and just enough population to have a decent amount of trained profesionals available..
Another point is, the data center will serve all LatAm not just Chile, so what really matters is where in the region you can get the fastests and more reliable bandwidth links to the US at the lowest price..
Data centers usually can be considered a long term type of thing and I´m pretty sure that Google is not going to build a "smallish" one, but I see your point regarding bandwidth and links.
You seem to imply that Brazil may be lacking political stability, infrastructure and/or trained professionals, but I don´t know to what extent this would be true. You have to consider that, aside from the economy, Brazil has up to 34% of all latin american population with the vast majority of it living on the eastern coast line. Placing a data center on the west coast does not add up.
There might be some other underlying reason why Google decided to settle in Chile. Maybe the cooler climate can reduce their operational costs.
