Investment firm I Squared Capital has acquired a majority stake in Brazilian data center firm Elea.

Announced this week, terms of the deal were not shared.

Elea operates nine data center campuses across Brazil, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasília. The company has around 300MW of powered land and more than 1GW currently in development.

I Squared said its investment will support Elea’s planned expansion program and “accelerate the development of large-scale, high-density AI infrastructure across Brazil.”

“Elea represents a compelling, ground-level opportunity to build a scaled digital infrastructure platform in one of the fastest-growing data center markets globally,” said Gautam Bhandari, chief investment officer at I Squared Capital.

“The company combines a national colocation footprint, a substantial and well-located powered landbank, including its 3GW+ Rio AI City development, which provides a strong foundation for capacity expansion. Together with Elea’s founder-led management team, we are focused on building a next-generation platform designed for large-scale hyperscale and AI deployments. We believe this positions Elea to capture the structural growth driven by cloud adoption, artificial intelligence, and service training demand for international markets.”

US-based I Squared Capital has assets worth $50 billion under management, and is an investor in other digital infrastructure companies, including European data center firm nLighten and APAC data center operator BDx, fiber firms Exa and Lightstorm, and thousands of cell tower sites. In 2021, I Squared acquired Mexican data center firm Kio.

Alessandro Lombardi, president and founder of Elea Data Centers, said: “AI infrastructure is now constrained less by technology and more by access to energy. Brazil is one of the few markets in the world with gigawatt-scale renewable energy available for data center expansion. With this investment, we are scaling a distributed AI infrastructure platform designed to unlock that potential across the country.”

Elea was founded by Piemonte Holding in 2019, and in 2021 was invested in by Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The company has seven data centers across Brasília (two), Curitiba, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Porto Alegre (two), with more in development. It has previously acquired data centers from TIM, Globo, DXC, and Oi.

The company is planning a 1GW campus in Rio, known as the Rio AI City project.