Southern Cross Group and Goldman Sachs-backed Global Compute are investing in a new Latin American-focused data center firm.
Data Horizon Americas (DHA) announced this week that it has secured institutional financial backing from Global Compute and Southern Cross Group (SCG). Terms of the backing were not disclosed.
DHA also announced plans for its first campus, to be located in the Bogota Metropolitan Region of Colombia.
The 12.4-acre site within the Zona Franca Occidente (ZFO) and will support up to 55 MW of capacity. The DHA reference design for the campus site spans over 29,500 sqm (317,500 sq ft) with up to six buildings. The first building, BOG-01, due live in H1 2024.
Global Compute is backed by the Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division, which set up the company in 2020. It subsequently acquired Polish data center operator Atman.
"Investing in this early-stage datacenter market through the DHA platform closely aligns with Global Compute's stated objectives of serving the critical deployment needs of customers around the world, whether through existing platform expansion as we are doing with our Atman, S.A. portfolio company in Poland, or creating a platform to service an undersupplied market such as Bogota, Colombia," said Global Compute CEO, Scott Peterson. "We look forward to using the ZFO campus as a springboard to becoming a provider of choice not only in the Colombian market, but potentially other Latin American markets as well."
Southern Cross Group is a Latin American private equity firm. Its current IT & telecoms investments include Mexican telco Evengroup and IT services firm Axity. It has previously invested in Chilesat.
"We are extremely excited about creating DHA and bringing this new type of technology infrastructure to Colombia. Southern Cross has been investing in the country for more than a decade now, and in Latin America and the telecom sector for more than 20 years, so we feel very comfortable with this investment. Due to the potential of the sector and the quality of the partners, we believe that DHA is a unique opportunity,” said Diego Acevedo, Head of SCG in Colombia.
DHA founding partner, Yusuf Nahmiyas, added: "Teaming up with two institutions with the pedigrees of Global Compute and SCG validates DHA's disciplined approach to market and site selection, resulting in our first acquisition in Bogota. Multiple other initiatives are currently under active engagement and this partnership will undoubtedly broaden and accelerate our scope of activity in Colombia as our launch market, and the broader region in due course."
