Engineering company with 40 years’ experience air conditioning systems

Experienced with assembling of air conditioning, ventilation and exhaust systems.

In 2017 our efforts were directed to the data centre field. In 2020 we were privileged to perform the assembling of SCALA SP3 HVAC system. Continually seeking for quality on service provision, we had the first recurrence of HVAC assembling system with SCALA SP4, and recently SCALA SP5

Alongside this, Scala has firmly asserted itself as a market leader in the field of green standards.

“What makes us really proud is that, since the beginning, sustainability has been a must. This means huge investments to drive lower PUEs, only renewable sourcing since our first day of operation, and being the first Latin American data centre to reach a carbon neutrality status, plus the first to operate with 100% renewable sources in the region.”

“The average PUE for data centres in Latin America is 1.74. Our average PUE in loaded sites today is under 1.35 and, in our most recent designs, we are already reaching below 1.30. We’re very proud to be leading the industry in our region in this way being the benchmark to be followed.”

Creating LATAM’s hyperscale market

Currently, Scala’s key availability zones in Brazil can be seen as a triangle of its vast Tamboré, Jundiaí and Campinas campuses. Then, running in parallel to these expansions, it is also rapidly developing its presence in other cities in Brazil – Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre – and also in other LATAM countries, including Colombia, Mexico and Chile.

What makes Scala so successful in this emerging market is the strategic positioning of its data centres, in order to create opportunistic availability zones, which are precisely designed to best serve customers.

Scala’s ascent to the top of the LATAM DC market began in Brazil, upon the acquisition of two premium data centres from the UOL Group.

MARCOS PEIGO CO-FOUNDER & CEO SCALA DATA CENTERS

“We quickly decided to grow, with the idea of big campuses in LATAM mirroring the US markets. Seeing this growth combined with the maturity of the applications, the constraints of power and growth in North America, plus the demand for lower latency deployments in Latin America, we drive for bigger deployments,” Peigo explains.

“Before 2020, the average deployments in Latin America (for a hyperscale site) were 2-3MW. Now, we’re talking about 20-30MW buildings dedicated to single hyperscale customers, not only in Brazil but also in other countries.”

In fact, Scala is currently deploying its Lampa campus which is already the biggest campus ever permitted in Chile, with 120MW of total capacity and 90MW of IT capacity when fully deployed.

“And to give you a sense of how big we plan for some locations to be, for our Tamboré campus alone, we have secured 600MW of power, which makes Tamboré the fourth largest campus in the world, and by far the biggest one in the entire LATAM market,” Peigo says.

“We already have 100MW in production, and we are now adding a second substation with another 100MW and the third substation will be 400MW. It's a massive amount of capacity. To give some perspective on this, the consumption in Tamboré alone will be the same size as the consumption required for the entirety of Brasília.”

The pace of Scala’s growth – particularly in 2022 and 2023 – is massive. But why? Beyond simply a case of profit for profit’s sake, why has the speed of growth been set as such a paramount priority for the provider?

“Firstly, we understood from the beginning that this hyperscale market didn't exist in LATAM. We had hyperscale customers with capacity deployed in LATAM, but all of their capacity or all of their loads were relatively small, with one megawatt here, two megawatts there, and so on.”

SGRUTB04 went into service in 2022, dedicated to a single hyperscale client, with a commitment to full capacity for more than a decade from which we control everything from the design up to construction management.”

The Center of Excellence gives Scala a far greater degree of control in the design, construction management, planning and performance evaluation of its data centres. Rather than using general contractors, the centre gives the company centralised control, helping it to implement a streamlined, uniform approach across its entire Latin American portfolio.

“Instead of having branches of Scala, we have uniform sites. So, if you’re working for Scala in a data centre – whether it’s in Colombia or Rio – it's the same local structure, supported by our centralised command centre. We basically change the address.”

This approach is not only fostering efficiencies across the entire portfolio, but this approach is a cornerstone of Scala’s company culture.

“Add to this equation that the majority of the existing DC’s in the region were smaller in average size than a single data hall of a real hyperscale facility. Of course, they were built in an era where the capacity and the visibility for the future was very small, but that does not change the fact those structures were not ready for the current demand. Plus, they were designed without the sustainable requirements that we have today.”

Peigo explains that, very early on, Scala realised the hyperscale expertise on engineering, design and sustainability for data centres were practically non-existent in LATAM. Then, they instead decided to invest in creating this expertise from the ground up.

“So, we hired a lot of people and built our Center of Excellence in Engineering (CoE),

“We are not creating the sense that Brazil is the biggest country and the centre of our portfolio – Scala is a Latin American platform.

“With the non-Brazilian employees that we have hired, we bring them to the headquarters, and they stay with us for three to six months, working and getting trained in the common centre. Then, when they get back to their countries, they’ve left a piece of their country here and they take a piece of Scala there. This forges our culture and strengthens the bonds among our people, it doesn’t matter where they live or work.

“This is the way we are growing as a unique company: a single entity, operating all of these campuses in a sustainable way throughout Latin America.”