New public cloud regions coming to LatAm soon

On the back of continued demand for processing and AI, a major global public cloud provider is set to expand its regional footprint and announce new cloud regions for Latin America in the coming days.

The announcement will include new types of regions, including some of the first for Latin America focused on data sovereignty for public bodies, market sources told BNamericas on condition of anonymity.

Still with room for growth compared to more advanced markets, and especially following the boom in generative AI, Latin America has attracted interest from major players around projects that reduce the latency of services and increase options for local customers.

At present, and with the opening of Microsoft's first region in Mexico in May, Latin America totals 15 public cloud regions from major providers, deployed in four countries: Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Colombia.

They belong to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle, Huawei and Google, in addition to Microsoft.

Among the latest developments, Huawei in Q1 leveraged its cloud structure in Brazil with the activation of a third availability zone (datacenter cluster) in São Paulo.

With the launch, Huawei Cloud reached 85 availability zones in 30 regions across the globe, with more than 2,800 content delivery network nodes.

According to Huawei, the zone has caused latency to drop to a very low 27 milliseconds for services in Brazil.

Of all big five cloud players, however, Oracle has most cloud regions in Latin America: two in Brazil, two in Mexico, two in Chile and one in Colombia. 

It was also the first to have two in Chile and the first to launch a cloud region in Colombia.

Overall, Latin America's datacenter industry is poised for continued growth over the next 5-7 years fueled by cloud and AI, with a series of projects under development and due for activation in the coming quarters.

According to real estate specialist CBRE, total datacenter inventory in Latin America reached 757MW in operational critical capacity last year, up 16%.

The figure is similar to that of real estate and investment management company JLL, which estimates Latin America’s leading datacenter hotspots having nearly 750MW in built-in IT load capacity.

In Brazil, in particular, JLL estimated in March that the local datacenter market had 900MW in capacity, considering projects under construction and being planned.