V.tal buys land for 20MW hyperscale datacenter in Fortaleza

Brazilian datacenter and digital infrastructure group V.tal acquired a plot of land in Fortaleza in northeast state Ceará for what is expected to be its first hyperscale-oriented datacenter.

Dubbed ‘Mega Lobster’, the facility will have capacity of 20MW and be integrated into the company's submarine cable landing station and to its edge datacenter ‘Big Lobster’ (pictured), both located in Fortaleza's Praia do Futuro, according to a statement. 

Big Lobster was opened in February with total projected power capacity of 4MW.

Like the existing sites, Mega Lobster will rely on V.tal's terrestrial fiber grid to connect to a neutral ecosystem, offering operators, ISPs and OTTs solutions to access Ceará's central PIX (internet exchange point), which already registers the second highest volume of internet traffic in Brazil.

”The construction of another datacenter in Fortaleza reinforces the company's strategy of expanding infrastructure in strategic connectivity hubs in the region to meet the growing digital needs of local and global companies,” V.tal said in the statement.

The company did not provide specifics such as area size, investment or a date to start construction.

In addition to V.tal, other datacenter players working on expansions and new datacenters in Fortaleza include Scala, Elea Digital and HostDime.

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Considering datacenters, fiber expansion and modernization and upgrading works, V.tal invested 4.5bn reais (US$943mn) in 2022.

In addition to Fortaleza, the group currently operates datacenters in Rio de Janeiro and Barranquilla, Colombia. 

As BNamericas reported last month, V.tal postponed the start of operations of a second Barranquila site, Chiva 2, which is now expected by the end of the year.

These sites are connected by 26,000km of submarine cables linking Brazil to Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Bermuda and the United States.

Overall, the company's current portfolio comprises 10MW in capacity.

The company also owns the largest neutral fiber optic network in Brazil, with 400,000km inherited from Oi. 

Last week, V.tal's CEO and chairman, Amos Genish, met with Claro Brasil's president José Felix to finetune the latter's leasing of V.tal's neutral network to expand its local fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service.