rish company Ilkari plans to invest US$60 million (mn) in Colombia over the next three to five years to scale its modular, high-density data center infrastructure and meet customer needs, including artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.
The company invested US$25mn in the construction and fit-out of its Colombian Tier IV data center and another US$20mn is currently being deployed to expand capacity.
Going in phases is maybe a bit more expensive [than building the final data center design at once] but it allows us to adapt to the market,” Juan Aguirre, chief commercial officer at Ilkari, told BNamericas. “Two-three years ago, when we were doing the design, we weren’t seeing necessarily the need for high-density racks. That suddenly came along.
Ilkari built the initial 100 racks with a density of 5 kilowatts (kW) and, since then, has been able to develop higher-density modules of up to 10kW. “We’re building in phases as demand goes up.”
Ultimate capacity at the data center will be around 500 racks.
Based in Dublin, Colombia is Ilkari’s first investment in Latin America. “We have an ambition within the next five years to have five data centers,” Aguirre said. Nevertheless, expansion across Latin America is not yet planned.
The company has a data center in Europe and is planning to add another in the same region “soon.” After that, it will decide whether to invest in Asia, Africa or reinvest in Latin America.
Ilkari selected Colombia because it is a large and growing country with a track record in digitalization and cloud implementation, where data sovereignty is important.
“There’s a strong local market and it’s very well located internationally. There are a lot of international fibre routes,” Aguirre said.
Colombia also offers renewable energy, such as hydropower, which was another important factor in Ilkari’s decision.
The Colombian data center hosts international customers, mainly in digital entertainment, running cloud platforms or artificial intelligence applications. The company has also started adding Colombian customers, most of them integrators or telecom operators running workloads or managing infrastructure for their clients.
“We’re getting significant interest from market segments where data sovereignty is key,” Aguirre said. This includes compliance-driven sectors such as healthcare, banking and financial services.
“There is an under investment in the data center world in Colombia, which means that there are capacity requirements from the markets which are not necessarily met,” he said. Older data centers also lack the density required for modern technologies. “That’s a great opportunity for us. But is a short-term opportunity because I believe we will see investments in new data centers coming up in Colombia”.