Ascenty: ‘Our segment is a highly capital-intensive business’

Amid efforts by Brookfield to source new investors for Ascenty, the Brazilian datacenter company continues to expand its presence across Latin America, with plans to open its third site in Chile by midyear.

In Colombia, plans for the start-up of Ascenty's first datacenter in the country have been paused indefinitely amid a "reprioritization" of clients’ strategies to other markets.

In Brazil, Ascenty is seeking to advance capacity expansion plans for its sites, notably in São Paulo, while readying its first moves for AI datacenters. In general, Brazil and Chile will be the company's priorities for 2025.

Among projects under development or in operation, Ascenty lists 36 sites in Latin America. Of the total, 25 are in São Paulo, three in Querétaro in Mexico, three in Santiago, two in Rio de Janeiro, one in Fortaleza and two in Bogotá.

In this interview, Ascenty chief operating officer Marcos Siqueira tells BNamericas about the company's plans for 2025 and beyond.

BNamericas: What are Ascenty's plans for 2025?

Siqueira: It's a year that could be very exciting for Latin America as a whole. Where does this outlook come from? First, obviously, from conversations with major clients.

We have seen, in numerous engagements with them, the appetite for major investments in Latin America throughout 2025. It's unlike what happened in 2024, when they focused heavily on the US, not only for cloud solutions but mainly for artificial intelligence.

They will continue to invest in the United States, obviously, but they are already looking very strongly [at AI] in secondary markets, such as Latin America.

Based on our conversations since the end of the third quarter of 2024, we have seen completely different behavior.

BNamericas: In what way?

Siqueira: Over the last quarter, we've already had confirmation from many of these clients about projects for 2025. And this week, we've had a second confirmation about their interest in Latin America as a whole.

When I say Latin America, I mostly mean Brazil and Chile. Out of all the possible countries, these are the two that stand out in the conversations and discussions.

BNamericas: When you talk about this renewed and more heated interest for 2025, are we talking about AI or about cloud structures?

Siqueira: Both. When we talk about cloud structures, we're talking about more... traditional capabilities. But in the context of AI, we're talking about 50MW, 100MW, 150MW projects.

These are projects that don't necessarily need to be close to the source of consumption, like cloud. Because they're mostly for training, they can be moved and placed in different regions and places.

In this sense, Brazil's energy matrix is really strategic for these large companies. This always generates a lot of interest. Our energy cost is very competitive. But even if they decide to stay away from markets like the US to operate in the country, the market that continues to be the hottest is São Paulo.

There's a lot of talk about the [renewable] energy available in the northeast, but despite this, the interest of the large hyperscalers primarily continues to be in São Paulo, due to connectivity, workforce, a number of things.

BNamericas: Would you say that Latin America's potential attractiveness for AI datacenters remains intact, even with Joe Biden's decree that limited US GPU exports and with a "Made in America" policy by the new Trump administration?

Siqueira: I would say that, more than those, what could weigh unfavorably are tax issues. In Brazil, there's a considerable tax load for importing GPUs.

If we get to have a very aggressive tax proposition from the point of view of investment attractiveness, together with this energy at a good cost, renewable matrix and power availability right when the customer needs it, then this attraction of the region, of the country, prevails.

In conversations with customers, we see that they're also facing difficulties regarding the time frame for a datacenter to go live in the United States.

As for political issues, in principle we don't expect the change in the US administration to have much impact. And even an annual cap on exports of GPUs from the United States still offers a good margin for countries in the region to acquire them.

BNamericas: And what will Ascenty advance this year?

Siqueira: In the coming months, we're activating our third datacenter in Santiago. We are concluding construction and will start operation by the end of Q2. In Brazil, we continue to expand existing datacenters in the state of São Paulo.

Where we are aiming for very strong growth is specifically in São Paulo and in Santiago.

These are the two markets that have generated the most interest in our talks with clients. We have land, we have guaranteed energy, and a series of aspects are in place to be a good option for clients.

The Chilean market, through the Chilean leadership, has positioned itself strongly in terms of attractiveness for artificial intelligence projects.

BNamericas: And Colombia?

Siqueira: In our last conversation, I said we had slowed down construction of our datacenter in Colombia a bit. That's still ongoing.

BNamericas: The project is on hold?

Siqueira: It is. It's on hold because we haven't seen much interest from the market as a whole in the country.

We're still there, with the land, the buildings, secured energy, which are fundamental points, but we've held back so as not to make major investments and then carry an asset for many years without the proper need.

BNamericas: What do you attribute that to?

Siqueira: Colombia has industrial free trade zones established, and this is a very important point. But, perhaps, taking into account what clients have voiced, the country's political and economic issues may have generated this movement of holding back investments.

It doesn't mean that they won't make these investments, but they held them back.

Now, in 2024 we saw lots of [technology] companies that had major goals for Latin America end up concentrating heavily on the US. They even took professionals who were focused on Latin America to help with workload in North America.

Projects focused on AI datacenters are frenetic, but they also change all the time in their conception phase in terms of configuration, cooling, design, etc. In other words, datacenter companies are also learning how to deal with this model. They're learning.

BNamericas: In recent quarters, Ascenty's datacenter capacity hasn't increased, it's been flat. There has also been almost no increase in land for development or land under development. Why?

Siqueira: I'd say, this is associated with some of the issues I mentioned – the reprioritization of investments by large players to other markets.

We grew a lot in 2024 in the enterprise segment. However, the enterprise segment, due to the volume of capacity it offers, doesn't change the "ticker" of installed capacity indexes in the same proportion as cloud [datacenters do].

If I sell a lot in enterprise, within a year, this represents 2MW, 3MW tops. It won't necessarily appear in the bookings.

That said, we made important deliveries to hyperscale customers now at the end of 2024, and we have other deliveries happening throughout 2025.

BNamericas: Right, but these deliveries aren't new. They don't appear in the latest reports as land under development. They had already been computed, right?

Siqueira: Yes. They already went to the bookings. But we're delivering and moving forward, especially since the end of 2024.

And, as I said, there were these reprioritizations by customers, plus the large sales we made in enterprise, which don't significantly change the capacity as it's reported.

I don't know how all the other companies disclose their operations, but what we disclose is what was actually sold.

We're projecting the start of some construction [projects] for 2025. Some large ones started in 2024 and, in the coming months, we're starting others.

BNamericas: You mentioned AI infrastructure many times as example, but Ascenty hasn't yet announced any 100MW project, for example. Are you preparing to enter this segment as well?

Siqueira: We haven't announced anything yet. Due to our policy and our characteristics, we only go public when we have something very concrete. We believe that we will soon have news to share.

BNamericas: So you're working on some things regarding AI datacenters.

Siqueira: Many, many things.

BNamericas: Does Brookfield's search for a new investor for Ascenty, as sources have confirmed, change the company's strategy? What can you say about that?

Siqueira: The company does not comment on market rumors. What I can tell you is this: The fact is that our segment is a highly capital-intensive business.

A 100MW datacenter requires a lot of resources. We're privileged to have two very strong investors. Digital Realty and Brookfield are very well capitalized.

We're always analyzing how we can build more and more, at a lower cost and with affordable financing.