Santiago Suinaga

KIO’s success with its data center campus in Querétaro has spurred it to further expand in the area, with plans to develop a mega campus with a total capacity of 80MW in the next five years.

What is the focus of KIO expansion and investment strategy?

As a company we are 21 years old, though KIO was acquired in late 2021 by I Squared Capital, an infrastructure fund administrator based in Miami with a global presence. Since the beginning, KIO decided to pioneer the installation of mission critical data centers in Mexico. Currently, KIO Data Centers operates more than 15 state-of-the-art data center campuses with high security, availability, and density in Mexico, Colombia, Central America, and Spain. We have an aggressive expansion plan not only in Mexico but in other countries that we do not yet have a presence in. Our focus is on Latam, though we have some interests in Spain. Right now, we have a presence in several cities in Mexico and Central America and are currently moving into Colombia. We are also analyzing and exploring other opportunities in South America.

What steps are you taking to ensure sufficient power to operate your data centers in Mexico?

We have the advantage of being locals and have been in the business for over 20 years. Being local always gives you an advantage as you can easily find the power, the energy, the components, and so forth. Power capacity is certainly a constraint everywhere in the world, though there are ways in which you can plan ahead and secure power for such operations. The great thing is that we were able to secure land and power, which is a tremendous opportunity for such deployments looking for capacity in Mexico and Latam. Our data centers are interconnected, which allows us to continue offering the highest availability to our customers, with geographically distributed redundancy options to host main, secondary and backup sites, obtaining maximum resilience to any situation that may arise.

Can you elaborate on KIO’s operations in Querétaro and its mega data center campus?

We built our first data center in Mexico City in 2002. Later, in 2007 we became pioneers in Querétaro as the first data center there. Since then, more have followed. KIO is extremely proud to continue with our expansion process. Querétaro will continue to grow as a technology hub and receive investment for such infrastructure. We have secured 50MW of power capacity for our mega campus in Querétaro. We have a vast and important ecosystem at our KIO Querétaro 1 (QRO1) data center, featuring companies working on clouds, internet providers, some of the largest banks in the country, stock exchanges, retail businesses, logistics, and transportation companies. Most of the Fortune 500 companies in Mexico have located their infrastructure in QRO1. Furthermore, it accommodates all the telecoms providers that have infrastructure in the country. That data center is working at full capacity, and we are currently building the QRO2 data center on an adjacent plot of land. QRO2 will be a denser data center, with a 12-MW capacity compared to the original 8MW. The data center will not only serve retail co-location but also the wholesale market. We have also secured a 25,000-sqm plot of land across from QRO1 and QR 2 on which to ultimately locate QRO3. The three data centers will create a mega campus with ultimate capacity of 80MW. QRO1 will continue to have a variety of clients in its ecosystem, QRO2 will cater to a combination of projects, and QRO3 will enable the expansion of the capabilities of 1 and 2. The campuses will be interconnected, which will be attractive to both hyper-scalers and traditional companies. Hyper-scalers want to connect their clouds to those companies to sell them services, and those companies can interconnect their private clouds and on-premises solutions to the private clouds through cloud on-ramps infrastructure hosted on our data centers. We have a five-year plan in place that involves all these investments and are also thinking beyond. We aim to reach a capacity of 113MW in the next five years.