Apr 28, 2026 | Posted by Abdul-Rahman Oladimeji
Investment firm I Squared Capital has acquired a majority stake in Brazilian data center operator Elea. Announced this week, financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Elea operates nine data center campuses across Brazil, including in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasília. The company has around 300MW of powered land and more than 1GW currently under development.
“Elea represents a compelling, ground-level opportunity to build a scaled digital infrastructure platform in one of the fastest-growing data center markets globally,” said Gautam Bhandari, chief investment officer at I Squared Capital.
“The company combines a national colocation footprint, a substantial and well-located powered landbank, including its 3GW+ Rio AI City development, which provides a strong foundation for capacity expansion. Together with Elea’s founder-led management team, we are focused on building a next-generation platform designed for large-scale hyperscale and AI deployments. We believe this positions Elea to capture the structural growth driven by cloud adoption, artificial intelligence, and service training demand for international markets.”
Alessandro Lombardi, president and founder of Elea Data Centers, said: “AI infrastructure is now constrained less by technology and more by access to energy. Brazil is one of the few markets in the world with gigawatt-scale renewable energy available for data center expansion. With this investment, we are scaling a distributed AI infrastructure platform designed to unlock that potential across the country.”
