EPL CORPORATION

Mexico’s Querétaro state has become the new datacenter hotspot in Latin America and is on the way to becoming the hub for industry 4.0 in the region. 

The central state has overshadowed other Mexican states in terms of investment in technologies.

The state harbors the Mexican operations of, among others, Bombardier, VUHL, GE Aviation and Continental, as well as IBM, Ericsson, Huawei and Samsung. In a report last year, KPMG named Querétaro the top state for foreign investment in Mexico, whereas S&P Global made it the first state in the country to obtain an investment grade rating.

Querétaro has also been praised for its successful pro-industry “triple helix” approach, based on facilitating exchanges between the government, academia and industry.

More recently, a series of projects involving colocation datacenters to host hyperscale cloud providers are set to place Querétaro right after the metropolitan regions of São Paulo and Santiago as the top poles for datacenters in Latin America.

In addition to the state’s pro-investment bet, part of the explanation for the growing datacenter interest in the area is in the supply of electricity, water and fiber optic infrastructure, as well as the demand for services from cloud providers and over-the-top applications such as Amazon Web Services, Oracle and Netflix.

The pandemic also ended up accelerating cloud projects that were already in gestation but received new momentum due to the greater use of remote tools and video.