Scala Data Centers on home straight to Chilean debut

Scala Data Centers is working on the finishing touches to its SSCLCR01 site in Chile, the first of a series of datacenters the DigitalBridge-controlled company has planned for the country.

Located in the Curauma datacenter campus in central Valparaíso region, the 8,850m2 building is designed to have 5MW in capacity. The project already has a long-term contract with a hyperscale customer, as previously reported by BNamericas.

“The first building is ready. We are currently commissioning this site and we’ve already started the earthworks for the other three buildings that will be built there,” COO José Eduardo Quintela told BNamericas.

Brazil-based Scala is finalizing the façade and there is a possibility that the datacenter will start operating within 30 days, according to the COO. Initially, the site was expected to be up and running in Q1.

The four facilities with total installed capacity of 30MW and 38 emergency generator sets will be developed in four stages.

Scala submitted the US$65mn Curauma project, including two data rooms, for environmental evaluation in early 2022.

Valparaíso region will be the landing point for the future Humboldt cable, a 14,810km submarine cable being championed by Chile to connect Latin America to the Asia-Pacific region for the first time.

LAMPA AND HUECHURABA

Scala's entire Chilean portfolio comprises three clusters, or datacenter campuses: Curauma; Lampa in the metropolitan region of Santiago; and Huechuraba, also in the capital, CEO Marcos Peigo previously told BNamericas.

The three campuses will have combined capacity of 200MW and will require investments of around US$400mn in their first phases, according to Peigo.

Lampa is expected to be the biggest datacenter campus ever developed in the country, according to Scala. Works are still in an early stage, and Scala is beginning the excavation and foundations of the structure.

A large part of the equipment for the Lampa site has already been purchased, said Quintela, including from companies like Hitachi, Caterpillar and Vertiv.

Scala recently entered into a three-year supply agreement for mission-critical equipment with Vertiv. By the final phase of the project, 11 datacenter sites will be supported by Vertiv thermal management solutions in Brazil, Chile and Colombia.

“When we started the Scala project, we viewed the acquisition of equipment for buildings on a project-by-project basis. For each building we were going to develop, we started the supply chain organization for that specific project,” said the COO.

“Over time, with an understanding of how the market was behaving, the speed with which projects needed to be implemented, the level of flexibility we needed to have, and within a risk mitigation agenda, we understood that we needed to have longer-term contracts with strategic partners.”

It is in this sense, too, that Scala announced in November a multi-year energy supply contract with Italian group Enel for its projects in the region, especially those in Brazil.

This year, Scala announced the start of operations at two new datacenters in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

ALSO READ Snapshot: Scala's pipeline of datacenter projects  

As for the upcoming launches, a first datacenter in Porto Alegre, Brazil, is planned to be activated in Q4 this year, along with the company's first Mexican site in Tepozpark.

For the first and second quarters of 2024, Scala plans to go live with the TB12 and TB08 sites, both in São Paulo region’s Tamboré.

According to Quintela, the company also started work on a datacenter in Fortaleza, Brazil.

"We are busy with our projects and we have lots of deliveries for this year and for next," said Quintela.

Illustration: Scala's Curauma site (Source: Scala)