Chile will soon be housing a second Huawei data centre. In fact Huawei plans to launch the new cloud data centre in Chile by the end of this year, boosting its cloud and AI platform in South America.
Like the first data centre, which opened in 2019, the new facility will be sited in the country’s capital, Santiago. Naturally Huawei is upbeat about what it describes as “greater security in case of a catastrophe”, noting that the facility will also help Chile by providing the country with better access to Huawei’s cloud and AI services.
However, with its network business and its telecommunications infrastructure business both under assault during the ongoing US/China trade dispute, this is clearly a good piece of business for the company, whose cloud operation is one of the few divisions boasting a strong performance of late.
It’s also good news for Chile. According to the website Data Center Dynamics, this is part of an ongoing effort by Chile to encourage investment in its digital infrastructure and speed up the digitisation of its economy. The country has also been inviting foreign cloud companies to locate there.
Chile is also working on a Pacific submarine cable to Asia via a fibre route to Australia. The Transoceanic Cable, a 13,000km fibre route to Auckland, New Zealand, and Sydney, Australia could, with the help of Australian links to Asia, give Chile better connections to Singapore, Japan, South Korea and China.
A further boost to Chile’s connectivity aims came earlier this year with the arrival of Google’s Curie cable. The 10,500km Curie delivers 72Tbps of bandwidth across four fibre pairs to South America. Curie landed in Valparaiso in April; it was the first submarine cable to connect to Chile in 19 years.
