Piemonte’s Elea Digital cuts ribbon on second Porto Alegre datacenter

Elea Digital, the edge-focused datacenter company owned by Piemonte Holding, went live with the first phase of its second Porto Alegre site in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state.

The facility has 1MW of initial power availability and was activated three weeks ahead of schedule, according to a statement by Elea. “It is not easy to deliver on time a new site in this challenging environment where the supply chain is somewhat disrupted,” Piemonte CEO Alessandro Lombardi said.

The 4,000m2 POA2 facility is set to be the biggest datacenter in Elea’s south Brazil region, which includes the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Paraná.

At full capacity, the site is expected to reach 7MW. 

Elea said that the site helps Porto Alegre meeting “much-repressed demand” for colocation space and contribute to the digitization of the region.

The company bought the structure in September 2022 from Brazilian telecom operator TIM, for an undisclosed sum, and has since been pursued expansion and modernization.

“The expansion has been planned for high-density deployments. It is ideal to host aggregation edge points of presence of large international and national clients,” Elea said in a statement. 

One of the companies negotiating with Elea in Porto Alegre is Upix, as CEO Ronaldo Pelizon told BNamericas last month. Specific capex for works at the site was not provided. 

In a December interview with BNamericas, Lombardi said that organic (acquisitions excluded) capex for 2023 was projected to be around 200mn reais (US$38.5mn), or “a little more than that.”

In 2021 and 2020, Piemonte invested, including in acquisitions, over 1bn reais a year. Similar spending levels were expected for 2023.

Elea Digital’s first Porto Alegre site, POA1, is one of the most connected hubs in the area, the company said, leveraging a large ecosystem of telecom and enterprise clients.

The second site is close to a power substation and relying on already deployed redundant fiber ducts, with several fiber providers reaching the site, said Elea.

Elea operates seven datacenters across Brazil. In addition to the two facilities in Porto Alegre, it has two sites in Brasília and one each in Curitiba, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo.

As BNamericas reported, the company is also developing a datacenter in Fortaleza, Ceará state.

The company acquired five datacenters from Oi in 2021 for 367mn reais, followed by a datacenter in Rio de Janeiro from Brazilian media group Globo, and the one in Porto Alegre from TIM Brasil.

RESOURCES

Elea is a targeting a 1.5 power usage effectiveness (PUE) rate for the new Porto Alegre site. 

That rate is calculated by dividing total facility power (power entering the site) by IT equipment power (power used to run machines). The lower the PUE, the more energy-efficient a datacenter.

A part of these efforts are sustainability-linked bonds issuances, while Elea is also committed to replacing all cooling equipment in its current datacenters with air instead of water.

Based on September measurements, the company’s water consumption was considered highly efficient, equal to 0.51l/kWh of consumed energy. 

By 2026 and 2028, this indicator, also called Water Usage Efficiency (WUE), will decrease to 0.31l/kWh and 0.20l/kWh, respectively. Elea claims that national average consumption is estimated at 7.60l/kWh.

Elea did not specify the water consumption rate for the new site, only mentioning it is set to have an "incredibly low WUE."