Argentina’s Wamani Ranch Turns Doomsday Prep Into an AI Infrastructure Project
A 32,000-hectare Andes property owned by six wealthy tech entrepreneurs is adding solar power, an airstrip and plans for local AI models, but viral claims overstate the spending and exclusivity.
On a 32,000-hectare ranch in Argentina’s Mendoza province, a group of technology entrepreneurs is building something between a remote retreat, a resilience experiment and a very expensive insurance policy against global breakdown. Wamani already has small residences, geodesic domes, solar power and an airstrip. Its owners are also studying whether large language models could run locally on solar-powered computers if access to global servers disappeared.
The project is led by Argentine-Spanish entrepreneur Martín Varsavsky, who owns half of Wamani. Five partners share the other half. The Financial Times identified among them Alec Oxenford, the OLX co-founder who serves as Argentina’s ambassador to the United States, and Dan Lubetzky, the billionaire founder of Kind.
That ownership structure is one reason the viral label “billionaires’ ark” is catchy but imprecise. Lubetzky is a billionaire. The Financial Times put Varsavsky’s fortune at roughly $700 million. The group is unquestionably wealthy and closely connected to the technology and investment worlds, but the available reporting does not establish that every owner is a billionaire.
The money claim has also grown in retelling. Varsavsky told the Financial Times that the owners had spent almost $10 million on Wamani so far. That is not the same as the more widely circulated claim that more than $10 million has already been invested. Construction continues, so the total can rise, but the current reported figure is just under that threshold.
The most distinctly 2026 part of the project is its digital fallback. Wamani already uses Starlink for basic connectivity. If global servers became inaccessible, however, satellite internet alone might not preserve access to cloud-based AI. Varsavsky says the group is studying whether it can download large language models to computers powered by solar energy. He described the goal as a limited private “internet.” A more precise description is an offline knowledge and computing layer: useful for searching local data, drafting, analysis or instructions, but unable to recreate a live global network without external connectivity.
The physical plan follows the same redundancy logic. The owners intend to add cattle and are considering more neighboring land where crops could be grown. The property has springs and streams, though Mendoza’s aridity remains a constraint. The Financial Times also noted powerful Andean winds that can make conditions on the exposed plain difficult. A huge property does not eliminate environmental risk; it changes which risks have to be managed.
Wamani is not simply waiting for catastrophe. Its official website now markets the property as a remote mountain destination, offering accommodation, food, hiking, horseback riding, internal vehicle excursions and help arranging private flights. Visitors can ask about availability. The Financial Times also reported that the owners are considering Airbnb as a way to make the project more financially self-sustaining.
That public-facing tourism model directly complicates another viral line: that entry is possible only if you know the right people. Private owners can still restrict parts of the estate, but the current website openly solicits prospective guests.
For an American audience, Wamani is notable because it turns a familiar Silicon Valley obsession with redundancy into real estate and infrastructure. Backups used to mean multiple servers and data centers. Here the backup includes land, energy, aviation, food production and AI models that do not depend on the cloud. The project does not prove that a private sanctuary could survive a global collapse. It does show how some of the people who built an always-connected economy are now spending heavily to preserve the option of living when connection itself can no longer be assumed.
