Brazil / Brasil: Brazilian company Petrobras issues a tender for data center operation

Petrobras, a state-owned oil and gas corporation in Brazil, has issued a request for proposals worth $17.2 million for the running and maintenance of its data center facilities. The company is accepting bids until August 11, and per Petrobras, the winning bidder will be the one with the finest technical and financial proposition. The bid is open to Brazilian and foreign firms with the proper permissions to operate in the country. Consortia-organized businesses are ineligible for the bid. The winning bidder will provide Petrobras with IT infrastructure support, structured cabling, storage of data, and virtualization services that must be implemented at numerous locations throughout the nation, which includes a full-time staff at Petrobras' research center, Cenpes, in Rio de Janeiro.

The company's supercomputers are located at Cenpes, including Pegasus, which was officially opened in July 2022 and offers 21 petaflops of computational capacity. In January, the corporation acquired Gaia, a 7.7 Petaflops Dell supercomputer. Additionally, the site houses the Dragao high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure.

The company utilizes a hybrid IT infrastructure, which includes some on-premises infrastructure and a multi-cloud strategy with Microsoft and AWS. Petrobras plans to invest $78 billion between 2023 and 2027, of which $2.1 billion will be allocated to its digital transformation. The company will spend $50 million on cloud computing this year.