Elea Data Centers: Sustainable Data Centre Leaders in Brazil

The Brazilian data centre industry has continued to expand, becoming the largest market in the LATAM region. In 2023 alone, the country accounted for around 40% of the LATAM region’s total investment. 

Amid such growth in the regional market, data centre operators like Elea Data Centers are committed to supporting continued industry growth in Brazil. 

Alessandro Lombardi, President of Elea Data Centers, founded the company in 2018 and has since acted as Chairman of the board. He is responsible for helping the company navigate the next exciting chapter for the data centre industry in Brazil, particularly in the midst of the global technology boom.

“Brazil has become a magnet for international clients and therefore I find myself travelling much more than I did in 2018,” he explains. “My role is now to act as somewhat of a representative of Brazilian digital infrastructure.”

AI and cloud demand: Remaining competitive

Demand for AI and cloud services continues to increase across the data centre industry, which is inevitably creating significant challenges for operators. 

Currently, Elea Data Centers has nine facilities running in Brazil, operating across five different states. Elea’s is the only geographically differentiated platform in Brazil, with most other companies just operating in the São Paulo-Rio market.

“Our clients have demands that appear unexpectedly and they need services immediately, which can be challenging in terms of planning,” Alessandro explains. “The real challenge is being able to plan where demand is going in these times.”

He adds: “We operate in other markets because we believe that digital infrastructure needs to be geographically spread. Especially because of latency and also with AI, you really need to have compute capacity closer to the population. 

“We understand how unique Brazil is in terms of green energy capacity and therefore we operate green data centres.”

As a result of these developments, the company has witnessed significant increases in demand for disruptive technologies. When it comes to AI in particular, Elea Data Centers is making sure it is remaining competitive within the industry by being flexible amid rapid growth.

“The cloud wave in Brazil caused a 10x increase in megawatt (MW) demand,” Alessandro notes. “Now with AI, you rarely see a client that doesn't have at least 100MW of demand. We are seeing an incredible demand – and the data centre is different. As a result, the product and the real estate are different.”

He adds: “We're being flexible with what our clients need because new technology, especially AI, is new also for our clients. So you need to be flexible. You need to accept that things may change. You want to build an environment which is prone to innovation, development and new technology.”

Offering a new type of data centre

With such large demand, the LATAM data centre market is becoming increasingly competitive. As a result, Elea Data Centers is preparing to meet continued demand from hyperscalers, particularly when it comes to AI and cloud.

“The strategy we are using is to have enough land adjacent to our existing sites to make sure that all of our data centres – or at least most of them – are expandable,” Alessandro comments. “We are also building energy infrastructure substations, transformers and distribution to our sites to make sure that we have some hundreds of megawatts close to our sites ready to deploy. Because that's key. When the money grows so much, you need to be ready.”

He adds: “We are investing heavily in energy infrastructure in order to be ready for 2025 and 2026, whilst there are not as many competitors.”

São Paulo remains the largest data centre market in LATAM, with its availability increasing to 62.1 MW from 52.3 MW in Q1 2024. However, demand continues to outpace supply – particularly in more densely populated areas – which means operators are now needing to implement strategies to address the critical need for data centre capacity. 

“São Paulo is highly populated, but it is less than 10% of the Brazilian population. For the other 90%, we are differentiating ourselves because, instead of going to the outskirts, we are preparing to design data centres which are humanised. It’s important that our architecture can live together with the urban ecosystem,” Alessandro says. “We continue to grow at a very fast pace because we truly believe that digitalisation needs to have the support of the community. 

“In Brazil, we have the chance to run data centres in a better way that is more sustainable and humanised. We see it to be an amicable kind of infrastructure.”

Being a sustainable pioneer

Elea Data Centers has a strong track record when it comes to its sustainability strategy, as it operates all of its facilities with renewable energy. In order to ensure that sustainability is kept at the forefront of its strategy, Elea Data Centers is committed to ensuring that its operations remain energy efficient, with the prevention of excess water consumption. 

“What we have done is make sure that our commitment to the environment is not only marketing, but it's true and factual,” Alessandro explains. “We have agreed with our syndicate of banks, which are some of the largest in Brazil, to measure some of our key performance indicators every year. If we don't meet these key performance indicators and improve them in the next five or six years, we will end up paying more interest.”

He adds: “We are also committed to power usage efficiency (PUE) and water usage efficiency (WUE) to use less power and water. This is also measured regularly.”

Alessandro is also very honest about other initiatives that the company remains very passionate about, including women in leadership. 

“We truly believe, especially in the IT market in Latin America, that it's very important to have women at the top of the company,” he says. “We have been working to hire women for different areas of the company, but very few of these are in leadership roles. So we have committed to achieve around 45% of women and other diversities in leadership roles in the 2028, which is a benchmark commitment in LATAM.”

Mendes Holler: Delivering on strategy

In order to make good on its expansion promises, Elea Data Centers is partnering with leading mission-critical construction company Mendes Holler. With more than 30 years within the market, the company is a true leader in construction solutions and delivers high availability engineering projects, whilst solving complex engineering and technology problems.

“Mendes Holler for any Latin American market player needs no introduction,” Alessandro explains. “They have built 60% of Latin American data centres, with 700MW of building construction engineering of data centres across Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Chile.”

Mendes Holler holds a vision for constant improvement in its services moving forward, whilst remaining eager to prioritise sustainability across all of its projects. For Elea Data Centers, Mendes Holler is a significant partner to have.

“At C-level, they are involved in the details, so you know who to call,” Alessandro notes. “Therefore, it strengthens a lot of what we are doing and the way we present ourselves to our clients maintains their confidence, because everybody knows that Mendes Holler has delivered hundreds of megawatts already.”

The end-goal with this partnership is clear: to speed up time-to-market. With Mendes Holler’s efficient reputation, the construction leader will help Elea Data Centers meet its deadlines faster.

“That is the most important thing – delivering on what we have agreed upon in due course. The key is on-time delivery. The global data centre market often experiences delays, but Mendes Holler mitigates this risk heavily.”

A key player in Brazil

Looking ahead, Elea Data Centers is seeking to continue being a pioneering influence across the LATAM data centre industry. To ensure that Brazil remains a key figure in the global AI data centre landscape, Alessandro notes that the company seeks to help its international clients understand its commitment to green energy.

“Transmission is great in Brazil. It's not an exaggeration to say that it is better than in the US – already in São Paulo, capacity has already been increased by 40%. We have a uniqueness that nobody else has in the market right now, with eight gigawatts (GW) of green power currently available.”

As Brazil enters a new phase of digitalisation, this green power is going to be essential to support AI use within the region. 

“We are already ahead of other countries because of our green power capacity,” Alessandro says. “To address the unique requirements of AI moving forward, it is about having a heavy engineering capacity and continuing to be flexible. First, we were designing sites with 30 kilowatt (KW) density per rack. Now, the same site is 100KW per rack. It's an enormous difference and I expect this to continue in the future.

“GPUs will continue to grow in their capacity, and with it their energy consumption. We will have to continue to make changes and I want our people, together with our clients, to be ready and to jump into the future.”

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