Huawei activates Chile datacenter as LatAm cloud competition soars

Huawei has activated the company’s first datacenter to provide public cloud services in Latin America at a site in Chile.

Huawei Cloud is also said to be the first international public cloud platform to be established in Chile.

The Chinese company expects to invest more than US$100mn in the country in the next three to five years. That amount includes the datacenter, which is located in Paine on the outskirts of Santiago.

This new facility also follows other investments in Latin America recently announced by Huawei.

For example, the company plans to build a smartphone factory in Brazil's São Paulo state as part of US$800mn in planned investments in the state over the next three years (2020-22).

Huawei Chile CEO David Yong said that the company's investment plans for Chile include the development of 5G and artificial intelligence, among other things.

Attending the opening of the datacenter on Wednesday, Chile's transportation and telecommunications minister, Gloria Hutt, said the datacenter falls under the so-called Matriz Digital, a government plan to bolster Chilean telecommunications infrastructure and which includes doubling the national fiber optics backbone and expanding digital services. 

Telecoms undersecretary Pamela Gidi, meanwhile, said that the datacenter "shows Chile is attractive for international investment," while the head of Invest Chile, Cristián Rodríguez, stated that Huawei's investment "reinforces the country's position as a digital hub and leader in the region in technological transformation and telecommunications infrastructure."

In addition to Huawei, Google also chose Chile to host its Latin American datacenters.

Huawei's datacenter activation takes place as competition in the cloud segment soars in the region: this week, US giant IBM announced the construction of a second datacenter in Brazil, its third in Latin America.

Brazil will become the seventh IBM region with an interconnected datacenter framework, called IBM Cloud (Multizone Region), and the first in Latin America.

With its expanded datacenter infrastructure, IBM expects to be able to deliver more robust public cloud services in the region, from infrastructure to services such as artificial intelligence.

In addition to IBM, Oracle announced earlier this month it was considering building a third site in Brazil, aimed mostly at providing redundancy and backup to its other facilities.

The US group currently runs two facilities in Brazil, both in São Paulo state.

Meanwhile, market leader AWS has had three cloud availability zones in Brazil since 2011, through which it serves Latin America with cloud computing, storage, database and business applications, and it is reportedly considering Chile or Argentina for new sites.

And German software company SAP last year started selling its ERP S/4 Hana solution in the public cloud through a datacenter opened in 2017.

According to IDC, worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is forecast to grow by 23.8% year-on-year, reaching US$210bn this year, while growth is expected to be 24.5% in Latin America.

By 2020, some 44% of Latin America's medium-sized and large organizations’ IT budgets are projected to be located in the cloud (third party public and private cloud), IDC said.