Ascenty goes live with ‘Latin America’s largest datacenter’

After rival OData announced the construction of Mexico’s biggest datacenter, Brazil’s Ascenty has activated in São Paulo state what it claims to be Latin America’s largest facility.

The milestone came with the expansion of its site in the city of Vinhedo, adding 25,000m2 of datacenter space at a cost of US$150mn.

With the new datacenter (pictured), the complex totals 46,000m2 and capacity of 70MW, which is reportedly enough to supply the lighting of 30,000 houses per year, on average.

“With the second unit to start operating in Vinhedo, we consolidated what is considered the largest datacenter in Latin America in terms of energy capacity and built area. It is important to highlight that on this same campus we still plan to build three other large datacenters,” Marcos Siqueira, Ascenty’s vice president of operations, said in a press release.

Ascenty now has 17 units in operation that total 228MW of energy and 148,000m2, in addition to another five units under construction scheduled for activation in 2021, totaling 22 datacenters distributed across Brazil, Chile and Mexico.

BNamericas reported last week that Ascenty was considering building a third datacenter in Chile. 

One is active and a second is under construction. Total investment in Ascenty’s two Chilean projects – the second with almost three times the power capacity of the first – is US$270mn. The first datacenter was the company's first unit to start operations outside Brazil.

Ascenty projects VP Felipe Caballero cited factors including ease of entry into the local market, good connectivity, a favorable business environment and abundance of electricity from renewable sources, describing Chile as a “strategic hotspot.” 

In June, Ascenty CEO Chris Torto told BNamericas that the company will invest 4bn reais (US$747mn) over three years in building and expanding datacenters in Latin America.

Ascenty, which is controlled by Digital Realty and has a strategic investment from Brookfield, owns 4,500km of a proprietary fiber optic network interconnecting most of its Brazilian sites. 

The company also has a plan to connect its 18 datacenters in the country to the landing stations of international submarine cables by the end of the year.