The top LatAm datacenters to see the light of day in 2023

Latin America’s datacenter market, which has boomed in recent years on the back of strong demand for video, streaming, cloud-based applications and data storage, is not expected to cool down in the years to come.

Several new projects already contracted are currently in development and are planned to go live in the coming months. 

These sites are in different stages and concentrated in the core markets of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Peru.

BNamericas provides an overview some of the main projects to be activated in the coming year.

LAYER 9

Project: Falcon

Where: Mexico

Expected go-live date: 3Q23

Newcomer Layer 9 Data Center’s Project Falcon is planned to be a five-building, nearly 100MW datacenter campus in Bajío region. In total, the five sites would require over US$1.7bn in investment. 

Bajío region encompasses Guanajuato and Querétaro states, which have become a major datacenter hub for hyperscale operators and global cloud service providers.

“The greater region of Querétaro, because of its immense connectivity back to Monterrey, back to Texas, back to Mexico City, is a natural place to have what I say is a density alley. It is absolutely clear, no question, that Querétaro is the Ashburn of Mexico,” CEO and co-founder Michael Ortiz told BNamericas in July.

The first two buildings will have 32MW of capacity each. “These two buildings have around US$775mn in spent. Both buildings combined will generate over US$2bn in economic contribution to the economy,” Ortiz said at the time.

In January, Layer 9 secured a PPA granting access to 100MW of power. The agreement included exclusivity rights and secured options to acquire additional land and power capacity in a second region of Mexico near Monterrey.

Last month, Layer 9 announced it broke ground on the project in Guanajuato. 

The company expects to go live with the first phase in the third quarter of 2023.

EQUINIX

Project: BG2

Where: Colombia

Expected go-live date: First half of 2023

With US$45mn in investment, Equinix started to build a second enterprise datacenter in Colombian capital Bogotá.

In its initial phase, BG2, a 2,900m2 colocation facility, will have capacity for 550 racks, with room to grow further in future phases. When construction is complete, the facility will provide capacity for up to 1,100 racks.

BG2 is set to be the first Equinix site in the Americas to adopt the “Cool Array” cooling system. 

This technology, already employed by Equinix in projects in Europe and Asia, is said to be more efficient in terms of volume of air supplied per unit of energy consumed.

According to Equinix, BG2 customers will be able to connect to its existing BG1 site, which allows for low-latency routes to the IBX MI1 in Miami, home of the Miami Internet Exchange (IX). 

The Miami IBX has over 150 participants and exchanges well 500 gigabits per second (Gbps), also connecting most of Latin America to the rest of the world.

Equinix invested nearly US$2bn in Latin America since it began operating in the region in 2011, including acquisitions and expansions in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Peru.

The company ended June with 248 enterprise datacenters across 70 metropolitan regions in 31 countries, 16 of which are in Latin America. 

Of the total sites, 108 datacenters are in 28 metropolitan regions in the Americas, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Bogotá and Mexico City. 

In addition to BG2, the company was planning to go live with the first phase of the MX3 hyperscale site in Mexico by the end of this year.

ASCENTY

Project: Hortolândia 6

Where: Brazil

Expected go-live date: 2023

The Brazilian giant’s sixth datacenter in its Hortolândia campus, in São Paulo state, is under construction and expected to start operating in 2023.

Ascenty, however, could still announce new regional datacenter launches or expansions this year, COO Marcos Siqueira told BNamericas.

Last month, the company went live with the first phase of the Hortolândia 5 site. This datacenter has 20% of data processing already leased to customers, with plans to reach 60% by the end of 2023.

The investment in Hortolândia 5 has amounted to 350mn reais (US$68.4mn) to date, potentially reaching 920mn reais by the end of all phases, according to the company,

The Hortolândia campus started to be developed in 2015. It is connected to Ascenty's 5,000km of proprietary fiber network and interconnected to the international submarine cables landing station of Praia Grande, on the coast of São Paulo.

Ascenty now has 28 units in Brazil, Chile and Mexico, 23 of which are in operation and five under development. 

OTHER PROJECTS

GTD 

Chilean telecoms group GTD plans to go live with the first phase of its second Peruvian datacenter in early 2023.

The company is investing US$50mn in the new tier III site (US$7mn in phase one), which will have more than 6,000m2 of floor space and 2,000m2 of white space and capacity to accommodate more than 900 racks.

The facility will be in Lima department, 30km from the datacenter the company has since 2018 in the capital’s Surco district.

GTD is also expected to activate in 2023 a second datacenter in Colombia, located in Barranquilla. GTD already has 531m2 of white space tier III datacenter in Medellín, opened in early 2016.

With total investments of US$20mn, the new Colombian datacenter will have 6,200m2 of floor space and a network deployment of more than 500km in the city.

Scala Data Centers

The Brazilian company is building its first site in Brazil's south. Located in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul state, the datacenter has 250mn reais in initial committed investments and 7.2MW of customized and dedicated capacity for hyperscale customers.

Scala claims it is the only datacenter of its kind in the region, and is scheduled to start operating in the second quarter of 2023. 

According to the company, the project already has two major cloud and content providers as customers.

A high-speed, low-latency connection is also planned for a future datacenter campus the company plans to create in Porto Alegre to support growth in demand in the coming years. 

Claro

Telco Claro recently announced an investment to expand its datacenter in Villa El Salvador on the southern outskirts of Lima. 

The project, which will have four stages, will be carried out during the second quarter of 2023, with the first stage requiring US$10mn.