V.tal expands datacenter footprint with US$50mn Porto Alegre project

Brazilian datacenter and digital infrastructure group V.tal will invest 250mn reais (US$50.7mn) in the construction of a datacenter in Porto Alegre, its first in the country’s south region and fifth overall.

Construction is expected to begin later this year, with activation expected for the second half of 2024. The site goes live in its first phase with two data halls and 3MW of capacity, V.tal's CTO Cícero Olivieri told BNamericas.

Dubbed V.OA, the new facility will be located in an area of 7,000m2 (5,000m2 of built area) in Bairro Quarto Distrito and have 6MW in power capacity, with support for 400 racks in four data halls.

The land purchased has a warehouse that will be modernized and used for the datacenter project, said Olivieri.

V.tal is in the final bidding phase to select suppliers for the datacenter, both constructors and equipment providers, he said.

Once ready, V.OA will be connected to V.tal's Rotas Expressas, a new data transport service with multiple capacities of 100Gbps that the company is offering. One of these routes is São Paulo-Porto Alegre.

"We are doing the entire modernization of our DWDM [optical equipment] in the entire network to reduce the number of repeaters necessary on the stretches while increasing the overall capacity," said Olivieri. "With this you can reduce the overall cost per bit."

The company does not disclose whether it already has customers signed up for the site.

"Obviously for us to make the decision to come here, we had a prior assessment of interest and of potential customers. But for strategic reasons we cannot disclose what is signed and what is not signed," Felipe Campos, V.tal's new wholesale director, told BNamericas.

FOOTPRINT

The site is part of an expansion plan in Brazil and Colombia. 

At the present, V.tal has four edge-focused datacenters in operation: Two in Brazil’s Fortaleza, one in Rio de Janeiro and one in Barranquilla, Colombia.

As BNamericas previously reported, the company plans to open a second site in Barranquilla, dubbed Chivas 2, by the end of the year. Initially, there were plans for it to be active by end-June. According to Oliveira, Chivas 2 is now planned to go live in November.

In addition to Barranquilla, V.tal also acquired land for construction in Fortaleza, for what it considers to be its first hyperscale datacenter, the “Mega Lobster”. 

The executives did not reveal when the construction of Mega Lobster is due to start. The plan is for the site to go live in the fourth quarter of 2025.

All of the datacenters connect to nearby cable landing stations with submarine cables operated by GlobeNet, a company that was acquired by V.tal.

In total, V.tal operates 26,000km of submarine cables connecting Brazil to Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Bermuda and the US.

PORTO ALEGRE

With several projects underway, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul state is becoming a new datacenter and connectivity hub, joining the more established hubs of São Paulo-Rio and of Fortaleza.

"We strongly believe in the potential of the south of the country, geographically, as an interconnection point even for the Southern Cone. Porto Alegre will see very strong demand for datacenters, and we have a very well-structured fiber optic network, interconnecting several routes from Porto Alegre to São Paulo," said Olivieri, who does not rule out a second datacenter in the city in the future.

In March, V.tal’s rival Elea Digital, the edge-focused datacenter company owned by Piemonte Holding, went live with the first phase of its second Porto Alegre site.

The 4,000m2 POA2 datacenter has 1MW of initial power availability and was activated three weeks ahead of schedule. At full capacity, Elea's site is expected to reach 7MW.

Elea currently has seven datacenters in operation: Curitiba (CTA1), São Paulo (SPO1), Brasília (BSB1 and BSB2), Rio de Janeiro (RJO1) and Porto Alegre (POA1 and POA2).

DigitalBridge’s Scala Data Centers plans to go live with its first site in Porto Alegre by the end of this year, with 7.2MW of projected capacity and 250mn reais in investments.

Initially, Scala's Porto Alegre datacenter was expected to be launched by end-June.

Brazilian private cloud provider Eveo also plans to open at least three new sites in the country over the next two years, one of which potentially in Porto Alegre, as COO and co-founder Lucas Vanzin told BNamericas.

Meanwhile, the Brasil Internet Exchange (IX.br) is working to expand and activate new network interconnection points in Porto Alegre, as well as in Belo Horizonte and the federal district of Brasília. 

Global giant Equinix is also eyeing projects in Porto Alegre.