Rio de Janeiro-based Piemonte Holdings expects to invest 600mn reais ($116m) in data centers throughout the rest of 2021.

The Brazilian investment firm plans to expand existing data centers and acquiring new sites in Brazil in the second half of the year, CEO Alessandro Lombardi told BNAmericas.

Lombardi says acquisitions are likely to be made in the coming months across Brazil in order to create a ‘data center federation’. Fortaleza is a potential target area, while deals could also be made further afield in Uruguay and Argentina.

The firm's resources are a mix of its own capital and capital raised with senior lenders, such as Bradesco.

Piemonte's project is "very long term," said Lombardi, with an aim of focusing on "selected, quality assets” rather than become a large-scale data center group in terms of the sheer number of facilities and capacity.

The company has recently upped the rate at which it invests in data centers. In 2019, the company acquired a stake – currently at 22 percent – in the GBT DataCenter in Brasília, which offers collocation data center services to Brazilian public banks Caixa Econômica Federal and Banco do Brasil. The same year the company invested in Elea Digital through its Private Equity vehicle Titan Venture Capital.

Earlier this year the company offered the winning bid to buy five data centers from telecoms firm Oi. The five facilities are located in Curitiba, Porto Alegre, and São Paulo, plus two in Brasília, in a deal worth R$367 million ($70 million). BN Americas report the acquisition has now been cleared by antitrust watchdog Cade.

Piemonte is making updates and expansions to the assets, which Lombardi said have been “kept in excellent condition by Oi.”

Last month the company agreed to acquire the Rio data center of Brazilian media firm Globo in a sale-leaseback deal. The deal is yet to be cleared by Cade, according to BNAmericas.

The five Oi facilities, along with the Globo data center, are being rolled into Elea.