Alog Data Centers, an Equinix-controlled Brazillian company, has launched its second data center in Rio de Janeiro, called RJ2. Redwood City, California-based Equinix owns a controlling interest in Alog and sits on its board of directors since 2011.

The facility currently has capacity for 320 cabinets and, with an additional US$36m invested in the next two phases of construction, will grow to 1,170 cabinets. The facility has a Tier III certification from the Uptime Institute.

More than 800 companies are colocated in Equinix’ Brazil data center, located in São Paulo and Rio.

Charles Meyers, Equinix COO, said, “Brazil continues to be of great strategic importance to Equinix and our global customers looking to access the Latin American market to capitalize on the abundance of growth opportunities it presents.”

The company cited a recent TeleGeography study, which said global traffic is being decentralized but exploding on a regional basis, particularly along the US/LatAm subsea route1. While bandwidth demand on the trans-Atlantic route increased at a healthy rate of 36% annually between 2007 and 2012, demand for bandwidth from the US to Latin America grew 70% per year over the same period.

Telcos have kept up with increasing bandwidth demand by laying new cables and upgrading existing systems, deploying more than 54Tbps of new capacity between 2007 and 2013. Several upcoming major international sporting events are driving tremendous capacity needs to carry high-bandwidth signals from Brazil to the rest of the world.

As such, network broadcasters, ISPs and mobile operators are expected to make significant capacity investments to build out their infrastructure to meet user demand in support of these high-profile events in the local market.

In the last four years, Equinix has lined up all the major subsea cable operators, including Level 3 and Telefonica, and telecommunications companies serving Brazil.

In May, Equinix announced GlobeNet's expansion into its Miami data center, which opened a fast IP traffic route from the US to Brazil.