They’re building a datacenter where? Canelones, Uruguay.
In my house, the country of Uruguay is somewhat famous. I participate in Postcrossing, which is a free organization in which participants register and exchange postcards with people all around the world. You join, and are assigned an address. After it’s received and logged, someone else gets your address, and if you participate enough, soon you have dozens or hundreds of postcards from around the world.
Uruguay is something of the Holy Grail. I’ve never received a card from there, and of the 78.2 million postcards exchanged via Postcrossing, only 3,520 as of this morning have come from a .uy sender. Friends who do Postcrossing have joked that if anyone ever gets a card from Uruguay, we’re all going out to dinner.
I relate this story as an example of how remote and somewhat obscure Uruguay is. For those who don’t know, it’s in the SE corner of South America and borders Argentina and Brazil. Independent since 1825, Uruguay is described by Wikipedia this way:
Uruguay is described as a “full democracy” and is very highly ranked in international measurements of government transparency, economic freedom, social progress, income equality, per capita income, innovation, and infrastructure.
Fun fact: the official name of Uruguay is the Oriental Republic of Uruguay. Why? I don’t know…please comment below if you do!
Google has broken ground on a new data center in Canelones, Uruguay, marking its second major infrastructure investment in Latin America. They’re putting $850 million into the project.
Funny, just last December we wrote a piece entitled “Oracle Cloud Launches in Colombia, While AWS/GCP/Azure Lag in South America“. I guess Google they decided not to lag any more.
Let’s update our score sheet:
Oracle
- Vinhedo, Brazil
- Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Bogota, Colombia
Microsoft Azure
- Santiago, Chile
- Sao Paulo, Brazil
Google Cloud
- Santiago, Chile
- Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Canelones, Uruguay
Amazon AWS
- Sao Paulo, Brazil
I’m curious why the Uruguay DC is necessary, given that Google already has two relatively close DCs.
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- Google is Building a Datacenter in…um, Where…?!? - September 4, 2024
- Vultr Partners with SQream to Enhance Data Analytics through GPU Acceleration and Improved Scalability - September 3, 2024
> Oriental Republic of Uruguay. Why? I don’t know…please comment below if you do!
It’s a reference to uruguay being in the east bank of the uruguay river, thus the spanish province that became uruguay was called “banda oriental del uruguay”. It then became the “Oriental” province, and finally, Oriental Republic of Uruguay (a better translation would be the Republic of Eastern Uruguay (banks))
Thanks for enlightening me!
because google loves uruguay.
:)