Market Trends of Latin America Data Center Construction Industry
IT and Telecommunications Segment to Hold a Significant Share of the Market
- The region is undergoing some massive investment from IT & Telecom providers. Adoption of digital technology at a large scale has been demonstrated to have good effects on lowering income inequality at the household level through a variety of routes, including increased connection and access to digital services. Digital financial services assist companies in overcoming eligibility and affordability barriers and give people secure and dependable ways to save money, borrow money, and insure against risk.
- The massive adoption of cloud computing, IoT services, and big data, along with the growth in social networking and the need for online video services, has aided telecommunication service providers in the region to establish their internet backbone. Google docked its private submarine cable, Curie, in Valparaiso, Chile. The cable is directly joined to the Equinix LA4 data center in Los Angeles, California. About 10 submarine cable projects will yield high data center investments year-over-year.
- The data centers in Latin America are being designed to withstand high rack density. The increasing utilization of IT infrastructure has increased the rack power density to an average of 4-6 kW among data centers in Latin America. The growing need for solutions such as high-performance computing (HPC) and virtualization will continue to grow the rack power density between 8-10 kW during the forecast period, consequently driving the data center construction market in Latin America.
- Latin American nations have excellent prospects across several essential pillars of a strong digital economy. Access to a meaningful (safe, productive, and inexpensive) internet connection and data is the foundation of the digital economy. Owing to mergers and acquisitions, the increase in market share of IT & Telecom companies is also rising sharply in Latin America.
Brazil is expected to Dominate Market Share
- The growing cloud computing (further fuelled due to COVID-19), increasing penetration of foreign cloud vendors, government regulations for local data security, and increasing investment by domestic players are some of the major factors driving the demand for data centers in the country. There are almost 120 data centers in the country.
- The demand for low latency and high performance, along with the recent work-from-home culture due to nationwide lockdown, is mainly accelerating the adoption of data centers near customers and businesses to enable hybrid multi-cloud ecosystems.
- According to the Brazilian Software Association (ABES), Brazil is Latin America's largest technology ecosystem. Also, according to the data published by Equinix, the IT investment in Latin America witnessed a 1.3% growth in previous years and is expected to have an upswing of 4-5% in the coming years. Brazilians' investment in the IT industry and telecom sector will be around USD 40-50 billion, respectively. This is expected to provide a massive boost to the cloud computing market and hence to the data center market too.
- The Brazilian government is also playing a significant role in developing local data center infrastructure. According to the government, the country's General Data Protection Act (LGPD) will implement, which is expected to force many enterprises in the country to migrate their cloud access to private networks and update their encryption services to extend user data protection.
- Furthermore, COVID-19 put high pressure on end-user companies to support remote working and are fast-tracking their cloud and digitization journeys. Companies like IBM and Microsoft claim that this will boost the data center market in the country as data center expansion enables organizations and government institutions to uphold data sovereignty by keeping data within their legal basis.
- As companies in Brazil look to gain greater control of their data in the face of upcoming tighter compliance and protection regulations, data center vendors, like IBM, are targeting customers by providing cloud capabilities along with a hybrid multi-cloud environment.