Scala Data Centers reveals plan to invest US$2bn in LatAm by 2025

Scala Data Centers plans to invest US$2bn in datacenter launches and expansions across Latin America in 2024-25, CEO Marcos Peigo told BNamericas.

The company, controlled by DigitalBridge, closed 60MW in new bookings last year, ending 2023 with 160MW in total contracted capacity for the clients of its datacenters, the executive said.

“This contracted capacity puts us right at the forefront of the market” in Latin America, claimed Peigo.

The approved budget, shared in advance with BNamericas, includes the delivery of what was sold last year plus the pipeline of some of the projects underway.

Given the volume of investments, Scala has different options on the table for structures and financing models and even an IPO is on the table, either in Brazil or elsewhere.

Scala works with a base case scenario of exceeding 200MW in sold capacity, according to the CEO, for whom 2024 will be focused on delivering what has been negotiated and sold in recent years.

For 2024, Peigo said that Scala has 180MW being implemented, including projects in production (pre-building) and under construction.

In 2023, the company made its debut in Chile. 

Plans for this year include inaugurating a facility in Colombia and putting a second datacenter building into operation in Mexico, plus its first one in Fortaleza, Brazil. 

Both the Mexican site, in Mexico City's metropolitan region, and the Fortaleza site, are planned to be ready in Q3. The Colombian datacenter, located in Bogotá’s free trade zone, is due for Q4.

In Chile, Scala closed a contract with a major public cloud provider to deliver two of three availability zones (datacenters) that the company plans for the country.

For confidentiality reasons, this client’s name cannot be revealed, Peigo said.

AWS is working on a project for a cloud region in Chile, adding to the sole region it has at present in Latin America, which is in Brazil.

TAMBORÉ CAMPUS

In Brazil, Scala is starting expansions for its Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre facilities, following sales closed with customers for extra capacity.

An expansion will also begin at Scala’s Tamboré datacenter campus in São Paulo state.

The difference here, according to Peigo, is that unlike the single-tenant hyperscale focus of the previous buildings in Tamboré, the focus of this enlargement will be on slightly smaller clients, namely large enterprise and connectivity ecosystem customers.

Among these new clients with whom Scala has signed deals are a national Brazilian telecom operator and US and Chinese cloud providers.

This Tamboré expansion will consist of several modular structures with 3MW capacity each. In total, there will be 36MW capacity delivered in three 12MW phases.

The first phase is due to go live this year in an “unprecedented” nine-month deployment, said Peigo.

Overall, in the Tamboré complex, Scala plans to inaugurate in April its TB12 site, with 6MW in capacity, and TB8, which will have 24MW.

The company also began the construction of the TB9 and TB10 datacenters, each with 36MW, and its TB6.7 site, with 44MW in projected capacity, all on the same campus.

"There are two buildings next to each other, the 6 and 7. The client had already purchased [capacity for] 6, while 7 was reserved for them. They decided to activate this reserve, so we decided to combine two buildings into one," said the CEO.

According to Peigo, the first three floors of this unified building will run the customer’s cloud services, with other three floors being dedicated to machine learning services.

In May, Scala plans to start building a 500MW substation on the Tamboré campus to serve all this extra capacity, with delivery expected in December.

For 2025, in the same lot of land where the substation will be located, Scala aims to begin erecting a new datacenter cluster with 100MW in capacity.