Cirion's plans to spread its wings in Latin America

Cirion Technologies plans to invest US$250mn in Latin America this year to build three datacenters and ramp up network capacity.

The firm has announced a new datacenter in Chile, one in Peru and a second center at its existing facilities in Brazil.

The company's investments in datacenters are complemented by its outlay on new connections with hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle, through the Cloud Connect service, which allows corporate clients to have direct and private connections to the clouds of those providers.

Cirion is also investing to expand its fiber optics network and update deployed infrastructure.

The company has also been spending on high-bandwidth ethernet architecture to offer services in 14 cities in Latin America. The plan, which began last year and will be completed in 2023, involves increasing the speed of its ethernet services in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, Santiago, Bogotá, Lima, Mexico and Quito, among others, to 30Gbps from 10Gbps.

It also expects to increase capacity in the different segments of submarine cables by 23TB this year, reaching a total of 132TB. 

BNamericas speaks to Alejandro Girardotti, director of product, innovation and strategic alliances at Cirion, to find out more about the firm's ambitious investment plans for the region.

BNamericas: What drives the need to invest in new datacenters in the region?

Girardotti: First, since becoming Cirion, we have reimagined our purpose and vision. [Editor's note: Cirion resulted from Stonepeak's acquisition of Lumen Technologies' regional operations in 2022.]

One thing that has emerged as the main theme is helping companies in the region to transform digitally, and that entails lots of things.

We're seeing large migration of workflows to the cloud, whether hybrid, public or private. These clouds ultimately end up being square meters with power, cooling and value-added services. That is to say, a datacenter.

We have 6,500 corporate customers and all of them are migrating or planning to use more services in different clouds, and all of that is driving demand for square meters.

We can serve customers with hybrid and private cloud. We have solutions for virtual machines-as-a-service, servers-as-a-service, hosting and housing.

But hyperscalers also want to come to the region. So, we see that there is still very big demand, whether as a direct business with the corporate or with an indirect intermediate business, with the corporate buying from the public cloud and the public cloud being hosted in our datacenter.

BNamericas: Are your datacenters already hosting hyperscalers?

Girardotti: We have hyperscalers, but I can't tell you which ones because we've signed confidentiality agreements.

We provide a complete service to this type of client. We provide them with a solution in any of our 18 datacenters in Latin America, but we're also connected to international networks with submarine cables. So, the datacenters in Latin America are going to be connected with 100GB links to some of the datacenters in North America.

BNamericas: Could you provide details on the status of the announced projects in Brazil, Chile and Peru?

Girardotti: Those projects are quite recent. The three announcements were made and the investments were approved and could be made public. In the case of Brazil, it's an investment to expand a datacenter in Cotia that had practically reached its installed capacity. It's a piece of land that allows for expansion and that's where the construction phase has begun.

It's an easier project because we already have the land and the power substations, and we only have to add square meters and do the power distribution and cooling part.

The other two cases are more complete because they started from prospecting a piece of land and analyzing energy availability to find the locations. In the case of Chile, it's a few kilometers from our current datacenter, which gives us a good interconnection so that both datacenters can work in a highly synchronized manner.

In the case of Peru, it will be in Macropolis, which is an area a little further from Lima, but it's close to our submarine cable mooring station.

We're in the planning stage in both cases.

BNamericas: The company also announced adding 6MW this year. Does that include the new datacenters?

Girardotti: Those 6MW include the two new projects, but also other minor ones because we're going to be expanding capacity in all the datacenters. That's something we do every year because there's always new technology, new processes.

What we're thinking about is a modular design, that is, these datacenters are going to be built with modern architectures that allow building the datacenter in stages, so what's involved there are the first stages.

BNamericas: Have you started the environmental impact authorization requests yet?

Girardotti: No, that's exactly the part that's being planned to start the projects.

BNamericas: And when do you expect to begin construction?

Girardotti: The expectation is to begin as soon as possible, but we don't have any dates yet.

BNamericas: Ecuador was previously discussed as a possible place to set up datacenters. What happened to that idea?

Girardotti: We have a datacenter in Quito that was built with modular architecture. It's in operation and is on the expansion roadmap. For now, we're going to continue investing in that datacenter because it has the potential to continue growing without having to build a new one.

BNamericas: And what about connectivity?

Girardotti: We don't have any major project in particular, but we continue to expand both the metropolitan and long-haul intercity networks, adding fiber and technology that allows us to have the highest number of terabits per fiber. We're going to continue doing that.

The same with submarine cables. I don't know yet how much we're going to increase in 2023, but we'll certainly announce it once we've done that.

A few months ago, we also announced that we're in the process of expanding capacity, which is a technological improvement of the metropolitan access network that will allow us to reach 30Gbps. We're growing in capillarity and extension.

BNamericas: Do you plan to invest in new submarine cables?

Girardotti: Our main strategy is to continue updating the electronics of the cables, which allows extracting more terabits from the same cable every year.