Terranova, a Latin American hyperscale data center operator launched by sustainable infrastructure investor Actis in 2025, has started construction on a data center campus that will support AI workloads in the city of Campinas, in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, with an initial planned IT capacity of 216 MW.
The Municipal Government of Campinas said in a statement that Terranova has made an initial investment of US$ 500 million in the campus. The campus will include a substation with an initial capacity of 300 MW that can be expanded to 1 GW if necessary.
“By building this data center, Terranova is not only investing in infrastructure, but also contributing to Brazil’s digital transformation. The growing trend towards digitalization and the adoption of Artificial Intelligence in various industries should make computing power and innovation increasingly necessary,” the municipal government said in a statement that was translated from Portuguese to English.
The campus will support the growing demand for AI in South America and is expected to grow from the initial IT capacity to 386 MW.
Despite only having just started work on phase one of the campus, Terranova is reportedly planning further phases with 2029 being highlighted as the year “different phases of the project will be completed”. The campus is set on a 233-acre plot of land but the data center and other facilities are only expected to occupy 28 acres with the rest of the land being reserved for green areas or donated to the city. As many as 3,000 direct and indirect jobs are expected to be created at peak construction and 650 permanent jobs over five years.
The data centers on the campus will leverage a closed-loop liquid cooling system, reducing the impact the operations have on the local water supply in what is said to be a water-scarce region.
Terranova announced in 2025 that it would invest US$ 1.5 billion over three years developing a portfolio of data center campuses in Brazil, Mexico, and Chile. The company opened its first data center in Mexico earlier this year with a capacity of 8.12 MW, scaling to 20 MW. The facility was developed in 12 months and will evolve in stages. Details about the data center project in Chile are yet to be disclosed.
“This is an exciting step in TERRANOVA’s next phase of digital growth. We see strong synergies between our existing data center operations in Asia and TERRANOVA’s growth in Latin America. This collaboration allows us to deliver scalable, energy-efficient, and sustainable solutions for global and regional clients,” said Mauricio Giusti, Actis Managing Director of Digital Infrastructure, at the launch of the Mexican data center.
The construction of a new data center campus in Brazil adds to the country’s significant growth in the Latin American data center market. Per Arizton Advisory and Intelligence, investments in data centers in Latin America are expected to top US$ 17.63 billion by 2031 as cloud adoption, edge computing and demand for AI, big data, and IoT grows.