Is South America the next big datacenter boom?

While we’ve tended to be distracted by the almost explosive growth of datacenter implementations in Asia and Northern Europe, much of what has been happening in South America has been slipping in under the radar. But the market in Latin America has continued to expand, with both regional providers looking to make international names and worldwide vendors opening or expanding their facilities in South America.

The most recent announcement came from Oracle, who pre-announced plans to expand by opening its own data center in Brazil focused on bringing the Oracle cloud services to the region. The facility is expected to be officially announced at December’s Oracle CloudWorld event.  With Brazilian law requiring cloud data to remain geographically in country, major vendors looking to deliver these sorts of services will need to partner with local datacenters or build their own.

Last week, IBM announced a $17 million investment in a new facility for cloud hosting in Bogota, Colombia. This more than doubles their first $8 million datacenter investment in a facility that opened in 2011. IBM states that 88 of the top 100 Colombian companies (as defined by Columbia) are already customers and that these businesses are responsible for 40% of the Colombian GDP.

And expanding on their existing investment in Brazil, last week Equinix announced the opening of their second datacenter in Rio de Janairo. Their RJ2 facility, is starting with  320 cabinets and is expected to quadruple in capability over their next two phases of construction. It is the only Tier III certified datacenter in Rio. Equinix is also investing in increasing the bandwidth available to the country in view of being able to support streaming from future sporting events with worldwide following, having lined up service deals with all of the major subsea cable operators.