Equinix is investing $94 million into its third Rio de Janeiro data center in Brazil.

RJ3 Equinix
– Victor Arnaud on LinkedIn

The RJ3 facility is to be located in the Sao Joao de Meriti municipality, around 30km from the Botafago neighborhood in the capital.

The facility, scheduled to open in 2025, will have 560 racks across 1467 sqm (15,800 sqft) of colocation space. Other specifications have not been disclosed.

Equinix said all its core digital and interconnection facilities will be available to customers from the start of operations, allowing direct connection with cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

RJ3 will also be located near Equinix’s existing data centers in Rio Janeiro: RJ1 in Botafogo, and RJ2 in Del Castilho.

The company said the three data centers will be connected, including a redundant fiber link between RJ2 and RJ3.

“Rio de Janeiro is one of the largest consumer markets in the country and a hub for strategic sectors, such as Energy and Mining. So expanding our local presence was the natural path for Equinix,” said Victor Arnaud, president of Equinix Brazil.

He added the company’s investment was the largest made by a data center company in the state and would allow Equinix to support more companies in their digital infrastructure journeys.

Rio de Janeiro is a landing point for eight submarine cables, including AMX-1, BRUSA, and GlobeNet. Equinix said this will give RJ3 access to broad connectivity and direct access to the US and Central America.

Other operators in Rio de Janeiro include Ascenty, Scala, and Aligned. CloudHQ announced plans to develop a new data center campus in Rio de Janeiro, set to be operational in 2025.