Business 18
A prestige contract meets a basic management failure at Ust-Luga
The New Luxury Backup Is an Offline AI Stack in the Andes
At Argentina’s Wamani ranch, resilience means more than land and solar panels: the owners want local language models, private aviation and food production that can outlast a network failure.
By Eleanor Ellington · 4 min read
For decades, the luxury definition of preparedness was physical: a second home, a cellar, a generator, perhaps a bunker. At Wamani in Argentina, the checklist has been updated for the cloud era. The owners want land, energy, transport, food and, if necessary, artificial intelligence that does not need to call a remote data center.
Wamani covers 32,000 hectares in Mendoza near the Andes. Argentine-Spanish entrepreneur Martín Varsavsky owns half of the project, while five business partners share the rest. The Financial Times names OLX co-founder Alec Oxenford and Kind founder Dan Lubetzky among them.
The property already has small homes, geodesic domes, solar panels and a private airstrip. Its official site says it uses Starlink for basic internet access and offers a range of mountain activities. The owners plan to bring in cattle and have discussed acquiring more land where crops could be grown.
The defining technological idea is still at the planning stage. Varsavsky says the group is studying whether large language models can be downloaded to local computers powered by solar energy. If global servers failed, that would leave Wamani with a private store of computational capability and information. He has called it a limited “internet,” though it is more accurately an offline AI and data layer. It could answer questions using what had been stored; it could not magically receive new information from a disconnected world.
This matters because modern convenience is built on invisible dependencies. A smartphone without cloud services is far less capable. A generative AI assistant usually depends on distant servers, power grids, fiber networks and huge data centers. Wamani’s answer is to move selected functions back onto hardware that the owner can see, power and maintain locally.
There is a status dimension, but the common “billionaires’ ark” tag goes too far. Lubetzky is a billionaire. The Financial Times estimates Varsavsky’s wealth at about $700 million, and it does not identify all six owners as billionaires. The group is still exceptionally wealthy; accuracy simply requires separating that fact from the more dramatic label.
The spending figure needs the same discipline. Varsavsky says the group has spent almost $10 million, rather than the more-than-$10-million figure circulating online. The ranch is being developed over time, so the number is not final.
Nor is Wamani invitation-only in the ordinary tourism sense. Its official website has an availability inquiry, promotes accommodation and meals, and offers activities including trekking, mountain biking and horseback riding. It can help coordinate private flights to the on-site airstrip. The Financial Times says the owners have considered listing accommodation through Airbnb.
That dual use may be the smartest part of the project. Infrastructure built for an extreme scenario can earn money and stay maintained during normal years. A generator that never runs can fail when it is finally needed; a property used regularly develops staff, routines and maintenance culture. Tourism gives the ranch a reason to keep working even if the apocalypse never arrives.
The real lesson in Wamani is that resilience is becoming a lifestyle category. Wealth has always bought optionality. What changes in the AI era is the list of things people want an option to preserve. Shelter, mobility and food remain fundamental, but access to digital knowledge now sits beside them. For some technology entrepreneurs, the ultimate premium service may be the ability to keep computing after the cloud goes dark.
