Chile is a country with several economic strengths. In Latin America, it is the nation with the highest GDP per capita, in addition to being a leader in several areas such as economic freedom, human development, or competitiveness. However, Chile has a particular advantage that makes it an attractive place for a specific sector of investment: astronomy.
The dry climate and the elevation offered by the Atacama Desert make it the ideal place for astronomical observation. Chile is expected to have 20% of the world’s astronomical observation in 2020.
Astronomy observation creates challenges for the amount of data that needs to be collected, stored, and shared with the world’s scientific community. The IT staff of the observatories is small in Chile because their specialty is not data management, but their gathering. For this reason, observatories require not only an extensive telecommunications infrastructure but also the technical knowledge that companies such as Amazon or Dimension Data.