ODATA bets $630M on liquid cooling to make Latin America AI-ready
What's the deal? ODATADealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, an Aligned Data CentersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → company, is deploying DeltaFlow liquid cooling at its SP04 campus in Brazil and QR03 campus in Mexico, backed by a US$630 million first-phase investment. Installation and testing are already underway at both sites. The goal: support the high-density AI workloads that conventional air cooling can no longer handle.
Why now? As AI processors grow more powerful, heat from increasingly concentrated server racks is pushing traditional air cooling toward its practical limits. That threatens to raise electricity use, operating costs, and the capital needed to run new workloads.
What's the endgame? This is a retrofit, not a new build. Both campuses already run Aligned's Delta Cube air cooling, and DeltaFlow lets them operate as hybrid halls — air for conventional servers, liquid for dense AI racks. Upgrading existing, already-powered buildings is the fastest route to AI capacity, sidestepping the land, permits, and grid-connection queues that gate new sites.
Developed by Aligned with cooling vendor MuntersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, DeltaFlow runs a secondary fluid loop inside the data hall, recirculating coolant to manage heat. The distribution units are built at Munters' plant in Araucária, Paraná, which will also supply upcoming projects in Chile and Colombia.
Water in focus: ODATA says its facilities require zero water for operational cooling, using a closed loop that recycles deionised water. That could matter in markets where water and power availability complicate large-scale data centre development.
What could go wrong? Closed-loop design does not guarantee lower environmental impact; electricity sources and equipment efficiency still determine performance. ODATA has not disclosed independently verified efficiency figures or how much liquid-cooled capacity the spending produces.
"As global demand for digital infrastructure continues to grow, the data center industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation," said Ricardo Alário, chief executive officer of ODATA.
The signal: The investment reflects a wider race across Latin America to build AI-ready capacity; rival Ascenty announced a US$1.2 billion, 150MW expansion in Brazil in July. With more than 20 regional data-centre projects at advanced stages this year, the contest is shifting from raw capacity to cooling — and to who can retrofit density into buildings that already exist.
Read more: intelligentcio.com
Image credit: NeoSpire
