Scala Data Centers Builds Out 560 MW Power Substation in São Paulo, the Largest in Brazil

Scala Data Centers has begun building out the SSUBTB03 power substation, a project with a capacity of 560 MW, at its flagship Tamboré Campus.

This strategic investment will enable a monthly energy consumption greater than that of the entire country of Nicaragua, which exceeds $80 million.

The data center provider said this initiative results from almost three years of work involving a multidisciplinary group with government support.

The move reinforces Scala's commitment to operational excellence and customer satisfaction by enhancing the campus's power reliability and resiliency, and by providing an avenue for major cloud and content providers to grow.

Unprecedented Energy Demand

The Energy Research Company (EPE), responsible for planning the energy sector in Brazil, has identified a high demand for data center connections in the last two years.

The SSUBTB03 substation surpasses all other data center connection requests registered with the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME).

Located in the heart of Brazil's largest energy consumer market, São Paulo, the MME has authorized the connection of Scala Data Centers to the transmission system through the ordinance issued on October 5, 2023, as per the following link.

The SSUBTB03 substation, set to be completed in two stages, the first of which is scheduled for December 2024, complements the existing SSUBTB01 and SSUBTB02 substations, each with 60 MW capacity.

"The magnitude of this project is compared to a few in the world and is the tip of the spear for a larger initiative that combines the demand of our customers for green data centers to support its evergrowing demand for cloud and AI with our vision for the country," said Marcos Peigo, Co-Founder and CEO of Scala Data Centers.

Scala is a portfolio company of infrastructure funders DigitalBridge, who also counts Vantage Data Centers and DataBank among their ranks.

"Power is really the constraining factor. And that's going to become more evident to you and to the rest of the investor community over the next two years," remarked Marc Ganzi, CEO of DigitalBridge, speaking during that company's recent quarterly conference call, per Seeking Alpha.

Notably, Ganzi added: 

"We started talking about this over two years ago at the Berlin Infrastructure Conference when I told the investor world, we're running out of power in five years.

Well, I was wrong about that. We're kind of running out of power in the next 18 to 24 months."

Scale is a Crucial Priority for Scala

Scala has continued to expand the Tamboré Campus, delivering the SGRUTB8 site with a 24 MW capacity and the SGRUTB12 site with a 6 MW capacity in April.

These two newly operational buildings have brought the developer's total number of hyperscaler-dedicated sites to five, in addition to the one dedicated to large enterprises.

Also, the company started constructing the SGRUTB9 and SGRUTB10 data centers, each with 36 MW, and its SGRUTB6-7 site, with a projected capacity of 44 MW, all single-tenant facilities.

Then too, Scala will start SGRUTB11 with 36 MW of capacity to serve multiple customers in three phases of development.

Additionally, for 2025 Scala plans to build a new data center cluster with 100 MW in critical capacity on the same campus.

The company's efforts are paying off. Scala has already committed $1.6 billion to the campus and is poised to inject an additional $3 billion into its expansion efforts when fully developed.

Meanwhile, this past February, Scala Data Centers announced that the legendary creator of the ubiquitous Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric, Christian Belady, had joined the company as a board member.

Concurrently that month, DigitalBridge announced that Belady is providing it with strategic counsel in support of the continued development of its global data center portfolio, which the company added is now positioned to meet "unprecedented demand" driven by investment in cloud and AI.

With expansion plans spanning all venues in the four countries in Latin America where they operate, Scala said it aims to ramp up its data center launches and expansions to reach $2 billion by 2024 and 2025.

Keep pace with the fast-moving world of data centers and cloud computing by connecting with Data Center Frontier on LinkedIn, following us on X/Twitter and Facebook, and signing up for our weekly newsletters using the form below.