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MEXICO CITY — Mexico announced Monday the launch of its national supercomputing program. “Coatlicue” — a machine that will process 314 quadrillion calculations per second, dwarf every other computer in Latin America, and place Mexico among the ten most powerful computing nations on earth — will be built somewhere in Mexico, a location that officials described as “to be confirmed.”

The computer requires four things: low seismicity, reliable water, stable energy, and high connectivity. Officials are looking for a site that has all four. The site has not been found. Construction begins in three months.

Mexico City was the first candidate considered and the first eliminated. The capital, home to 22 million people and the country’s entire connectivity infrastructure, sits on the drained bed of a former lake, above an active seismic fault system, in a valley that traps pollution, on ground that is sinking at a rate of up to 50 centimetres per year in some districts. It has excellent broadband. The broadband is sinking with everything else.

Guadalajara was considered next. Mexico’s second city and technology hub offers strong connectivity and a growing tech sector, and experiences water shortages with sufficient regularity that residents have developed private infrastructure — rooftop tanks, delivery trucks, rationing schedules — sophisticated enough that visiting engineers from water-scarce nations have come specifically to study it. Officials noted the water situation was “a consideration.”

The northern states offer space, relative seismic calm, and the kind of flat, open land that data centres typically require. They are connected to a national energy grid that, during last summer’s heatwave, delivered rolling blackouts to 26 of 32 states with a comprehensiveness that power engineers called “thorough” and that the supercomputer, which cannot be switched off mid-calculation, would find professionally incompatible.

The remaining options are, officials confirmed, on the map. The map is described as “a working document.” It has not been shared. Reporters have stopped asking to see it, which officials interpreted as a sign of confidence.

For context, Coatlicue — the Aztec goddess after whom the computer is named — presided simultaneously over creation, death, fertility, and destruction, wore a skirt of writhing snakes, and was so cosmically overwhelming that even other gods found her difficult to look at directly. Officials said the name reflected the project’s ambition. On reflection, it also reflects the site selection process, which is similarly vast, similarly complex, and similarly not yet resolved.

Construction begins in the second half of 2026. The location will be announced before then. Maybe.

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