Scala opens US$50mn Porto Alegre site, readies hyperscale campus

As part of bigger plans for the region, Scala Data Centers activated SPOAPA01, its first datacenter in southern Brazil, with an investment of 240mn reais (US$48.6mn).

Located in the 4th district of Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul state, the site has an IT capacity of 4.8MW and is equipped with modular components developed by Scala's partner Modular Data Centers.

The datacenter is starting operations with part of the capacity commissioned for a hyperscale client, Scala’s co-founder and CEO Marcos Peigo told BNamericas

“The site has the structure ready for 4.8MW of IT and we go adding other modules as the client occupies the racks and requires new densities, in blocks of 600-1,200KW,” he said.

The project is part of Scala's HyperEdge computing portfolio for distributed connection and computing and SPOAPA01 is located in an important hub for innovation and technology in the city, according to Scala.

But the company is not alone in betting on Porto Alegre. 

In September, Brazil's V.tal launched a 250mn-real, edge-focused datacenter in Porto Alegre and in March, Piemonte's Elea Digital opened its second site in the city.

The choice of Porto Alegre is based not only on its proximity to ‘legacy datacenters’ in a highly connected region, but also on the prospect of the city becoming a connection point for the Malbec submarine cable, says Peigo.

Activated in November 2021, Malbec is a 2,600km system developed by GlobeNet (currently owned by V.tal) and Facebook that connects São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to Buenos Aires.

A branch to Porto Alegre is being planned, which would link the state capital to Buenos Aires and further consolidate the Rio Grande do Sul capital as a connectivity pole providing low-latency communication to the Argentine market, according to Scala.

“In the future, our site will become Porto Alegre’s main connection hub, attracting customers who currently occupy other legacy, less modern datacenters in the area,” said Peigo.

CAMPUS

In the long term, SPOAPA01 will also connect to a future, separate Scala datacenter campus, revealed the executive.

This new project is to be developed on a plot of land in Porto Alegre metropolitan region and house hyperscale sites, with greater power capacity and size, said Peigo.

Scala is currently assessing two options for the campus: a project with up to 60MW of power and another with up to 80MW.

Works could start at the end of 2024 or beginning of 2025 but before that the company will decide on the site and establish the contracts for energy supply.

“This [SPOAPA01] is the first leg of a broader investment in the south of the country, and, quite frankly, in the south of the continent,” said Peigo.

Regarding technical features, SPOAPA01 is 100% powered by certified renewable energy. 

The building was designed to operate with a PUE (power usage effectiveness) rate of less than 1.4 and a WUE (water usage effectiveness) of zero, as it relies on a closed circuit and on air cooling.

The construction with Modular Data Centers was based on the FastDeploy concept, Scala's proprietary design and construction methodology which according to the company allows 50% faster implementation compared to the traditional model.

FastDeploy relies on prefabricated and transportable modular components integrated into the buildings where the datacenter is located.

PORTFOLIO

Following the activation of SPOAPA01, Scala now operates nine datacenters – four on its Tamboré campus, in Barueri (São Paulo metropolitan region, where the company is based), and the others distributed across the cities of São Paulo, Campinas (São Paulo state), São João de Meriti (Rio de Janeiro) and Curauma (Chile).

Three started operations this year.

The company is currently building new sites for the Tamboré campus and in Chile. It also has projects in progress, but not under construction, in a Jundiaí campus (São Paulo), Chile and Colombia.

Since its founding in 2020, Scala has invested over 8bn reais in Latin America and expects to reach 550MW of distributed IT capacity in the next five years in Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Colombia.