The project from Amazon Web Services is valued at US$205 million. The 43-acre site will include two buildings to house electronic and technological equipment, host servers and store data, as well as an electricity substation.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), part of Amazon.com Inc., has given the green light to a data center project in Chile by initiating the procedure to obtain the environmental permits for its construction. The “Storage Center” will be located in the Santiago district of Puente Alto and entails investment estimated at around US$205 million.
According to the information entered by the North American company into Chile’s Environmental Impact Assessment System (SEIA), the project includes two buildings to house electronic and technological equipment, host servers and store data. They will have low-water-consumption air conditioning and cooling systems and an electricity substation, and will be built on a 17.5-hectare (43-acre) site.
“This work has gone hand-in-hand with positioning Chile as a hub for the installation of technological infrastructure,” said Salvatore Di Giovanni, Head of the Investment Promotion Division at InvestChile.
Foreign investment in Chile
The first stage of construction is scheduled to begin in August 2023, with the implementation of the first half of “Building 1” and the campus. The following phase will see the construction of “Building 2”. The purpose of this facility will be to safeguard the electricity supply. The project will have 23 emergency power generators, with their respective diesel fuel storage tanks.
Operations are expected to begin in March 2025.
According to Amazon, they chose this piece of land on the outskirts of Santiago because it is an industrial and urban area within the limits of the Santiago Metropolitan Regulatory Plan (PRMS) and the Puente Alto Municipal Regulatory Plan (PRC). A maximum workforce of 310 people will be required at the peak of construction.
Amazon’s presence in Chile
In Chile, the company offers services to large companies, such as regional retail conglomerate Cencosud, as well as government services, like the Chilean police force’s online website “comisaría virtual”.
The company also participates in a public-private consortium on the cloud management of data from astronomical observatories, and it has installed a satellite ground station in Chile’s far south to reduce data collection times.
Amazon Web Services Vice President for Latin America, Jaime Vallés, told Reuters that they also have a special focus on start-ups, to whom they offer financing programs to use technology in the development of their businesses.
“At the end of the day, much of the generation of growth, productivity and employment comes from start-ups or small- and medium-sized companies,” he commented.
Local support for AWS
InvestChile representatives welcomed the announcement, as they have supported the development of different AWS projects in Chile since late 2016.
“This work has gone hand-in-hand with positioning Chile as a hub for the installation of technological infrastructure, both by demonstrating the conditions there for installing this type of project, and by generating improvements in the sector’s ecosystem so it can compete with other markets. InvestChile is currently managing projects in different stages of development in the data center subsector worth a total US$4.2 billion,” explained Salvatore Di Giovanni, Head of the Investment Promotion Division at InvestChile.
“Chile has competitive advantages related to our connectivity and high-level talent, as well as the availability of clean energy, which is a fundamental condition for global companies today,” the executive added.
To find out more about Chile’s development as a tech hub and to read about cases of foreign companies who have already invested in the global services sector, such as Google, Mercado Libre and Globant, check out the following article.
Source: Diario Financiero
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