By Brazil Stock Guide – Elea Data Centers, the first to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) at scale in Latin America, said on Tuesday it won a public tender from Petrobras (B3: PETR4; NYSE: PBR) to supply a new data center in São Paulo. The contract, worth R$ 2.3 billion (about US$440 million) over 17 years, marks the largest IT infrastructure initiative ever awarded by a Latin American company.
The facility will feature 30 megavolt-amperes (MVA) of power capacity and liquid-cooling technology to host Petrobras supercomputers and process scientific data across exploration, research and reservoir activities. The deal also enables the oil major to run AI workloads on the new infrastructure.
In line with Petrobras’s requirements, the entire operation will run on certified renewable power. The project will also employ 100% water reuse in its cooling systems and adhere to strict efficiency standards, making it one of the world’s most sustainable data centers — and the first of its scale in Latin America.
“Since 2024, we have positioned ourselves as the first infrastructure platform dedicated to artificial intelligence in Brazil and Latin America, because we believe this transformation is essential for the country. Securing the Petrobras contract is a milestone and reinforces our commitment to technological leadership,” said Alessandro Lombardi, chairman and founder of Elea Data Centers.
Expanding footprint
The project will be hosted at Elea’s São Bernardo do Campo campus in São Paulo’s ABC industrial belt, a strategic location with robust power transmission infrastructure. It adds to other large-scale initiatives, such as Rio AI City, a planned hub of data centers in Rio de Janeiro with up to 3.2 GW of capacity designed for next-generation AI and cloud workloads.
Founded in 2018 by Alessandro Lombardi, through Piemonte Holding, Elea is headquartered in Rio de Janeiro and today operates nine data centers across five major Brazilian cities, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Porto Alegre and Curitiba.
The company has been expanding aggressively. In July 2024, it acquired two new sites in Greater São Paulo — SPO2 in São Bernardo do Campo and SPO3 in Barueri — to strengthen its presence near key submarine cable hubs and energy corridors. A month later, it signed a memorandum of understanding with the City of Rio de Janeiro and Oracle to develop AI projects tied to the Rio AI City initiative, a planned hub in the Olympic Park designed to attract global cloud and artificial intelligence workloads.
Elea has also tapped the capital markets to fund its growth. On September 2, 2025, it raised R$ 790 million (US$150 million) in sustainability-linked bonds, its third green issuance and fifth overall. Backed by Goldman Sachs and other local and international investors, Elea is betting on the convergence of high-density computing, renewable power and artificial intelligence to cement its position as Latin America’s leading digital infrastructure provider.