After expanding in Brazil, Florida-based datacenter firm Vultr plans to launch three new datacenter operations in the next quarters, starting with Panama and Colombia.
“In our capital improvement budget, we have additional plans for continued expansion in Latin America and looking to open up to three new datacenters just here and in the next 6-9 months,” CMO Kevin Cochrane told BNamericas.
Specific capex figures were not provided. Vultr is targeting mostly locations next to global submarine cable stations.
BNamericas has learned that the locations the company is scouting in Latin America for 2024 include Lima, Fortaleza, Guatemala City, Panama City and Bogotá.
As per customers, focuses are chiefly digital startups, as well as local public agencies and enterprises.
Vultr’s business proposition is taking on big public cloud providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google, which in the company’s view offer pricey services and are not yet adequately serving Latin American enterprises.
“Our focus is to provide high performance cloud infrastructure to businesses and developers in regions underserved by the hyperscalers, as is the case of Latin America,” Cochrane said.
According to Cochrane, these hyperscalers are complex, 40-50% overpriced from a core cloud compute perspective and even more so regarding bandwidth, whose charges vary depending on locations.
Vultr, for its part, claims to offer flat bandwidth pricing so startups could save “80-90% or more” of these costs.
The company, however, does not build and own its datacenters, but leases structures and spaces from colocation providers. Its global partners include digital infrastructure groups Equinix and Digital Realty. The latter owns, together with Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, Brazil-based Ascenty, which is deemed Latin America’s largest datacenter colocation firm. Both are expanding their datacenter footprint in the region.
As BNamericas reported, Equinix opened its second Colombian datacenter. Ascenty, for its part, plans to launch its first datacenter in that country in the fourth quarter of 2024, as COO Marcos Siqueira previously told BNamericas.
In addition to these global players, Vultr also partners with local datacenter providers depending on the occasion and the needs.
In December 2021, Vultr opened its first datacenter operation in Brazil, relying on Ascenty, and has since reported a “very rapid” adoption of its cloud services.
“Brazil has since become our fastest-growing datacenter location worldwide. In the past three months, we’ve already grown 40% in the country,” said Cochrane. Demand has been fueled mostly by startups, according to the executive.
“We see Brazil as having the best connectivity and global reach and access to the latest-generation of GPUs and CPUs, so entrepreneurs can build over their services,” said Cochrane.
Because of that growth, Vultr announced this month a new datacenter operation in São Paulo. The objective is to handle not only current volume but also to put in place capacity for ongoing growth.
This second datacenter operation is not provided by Ascenty, but by a “local datacenter provider.”
In a couple of weeks, Vultr’s executives will be in Mexico City to announce a local expansion, through space in a new datacenter building.
The company’s datacenter operation in Mexico City has been mirroring São Paulo’s in terms of rapid growth, equally due to the rise of digital startups , according to the executive.
A Vultr datacenter also went live in January in Santiago, offering cloud computing and optimized cloud computing instances, as well as Kubernetes and cloud storage services, among others.
Source : Bnamericas