Patria Investments Limited Class A Common Shares Status update
Review the key takeaways and the transcript of this earnings call.
Transcript
Preview the first fifteen paragraphs, organized by speaker.
Hello, everyone. I am Andre Medina, IR director at Patria, and welcome to the sixth edition of our PAX Talks, today to discuss Patria's role in building the data center infrastructure in Latin America. This will be a panel discussion, so feel welcome to submit your questions. We will try to get through as many as we can. Before we start, I have to read the forward-looking statement. I would like to remind everyone that today's call may include forward-looking statements, which are uncertain, do not guarantee future performance, and undue reliance should not be placed on them. Patria assumes no obligation and does not intend to update any such forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on current management expectations and involves risks, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of our latest Form 20-F annual report.
I also note that no statements on this call constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any Patria fund. Okay, with that cleared, I am very happy to have with us Cristiano Souza and Rodrigo Abreu. Cristiano, who will lead the questions, is the founder and CIO of Zeno Equity Partners, a London-based equity investor focused on concentrated long-term oriented global equity strategy. Prior to founding Zeno in 2023, Cristiano was a senior partner at Rio de Janeiro-based GNO Gestao de Recursos, where he spent 30 years. On the other side of the table, we have Rodrigo, who is Patria's operating partner for digital infrastructure sector.
An electrical engineer with a Stanford MBA, Rodrigo has held senior leadership positions in large technology companies in Brazil, LATAM, and the U.S. for over 30 years, including the CEO post at two of the largest public telecom operators in Brazil. He is an enthusiast of transforming and creating businesses, and is currently focused on developing Patria's thesis on large AI data centers in LATAM. As you can see, two heavyweight names for today's discussion. Without further ado, I would like to pass the word to Cristiano to kick off the panel. Cristiano, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Thank you, Andre, and thank you for the opportunity to have this discussion. Rodrigo, maybe we should start with a little bit of context. Can you give us an overview of Patria's experience and history in this space, in Latin America, and so where you guys are coming from in this space, and what is the current position? What exactly is the current structure that you guys have in place for the data centers?
Absolutely. Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Andre. Cristiano, a pleasure to be with you. As you mentioned, Cristiano, to give a little bit of context of what have we done in data centers and what are we doing today. As you know, Patria had a previous very successful experience in data centers, in the data center space. Curiously enough, it was launched right at the time I was at Patria as an advisor back in 2015, 2016. By that time, the Patria team identified that the cloud trends would really speed up in LATAM, and there were no dedicated cloud data centers in LATAM. The data centers were here for a while. They had been here for almost 15 years, but they were still growing in a very small scale.
On the other hand, this was happening everywhere else in the globe with the growth of cloud. Patria decided to invest in a greenfield thesis by that time, and we created ODATA. ODATA was created from scratch. It had a first project, which was a small data center outside São Paulo. We say small today, but by that time, it was a 3-megawatt data center, so not a good size data center for 2015. It was built in 2016. It was launched at the end of 2016, 2017, and then the company started. It was an interesting experience because the company started really as a greenfield with no previous experience in the sector, just the reputation of Patria, its contacts, obviously the management team that Patria was able to attract by that time.
The company ended up being very, very successful, which transformed into one of the largest data center platforms in Latin America. We admitted a partner along the way, so we had a partnership with CyrusOne in the middle of the way. In 2022, after a very successful run, ODATA had developed seven data centers throughout LATAM in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Colombia, had contracted significant capacity with hyperscalers, with off-takers. At the end of 2022, Patria successfully signed the sale of ODATA to a U.S.-based company called Aligned Data Centers. The story that I used to tell about this is interesting because at the end of 2022, when Patria sold the company or signed the selling of the company, the closing occurred in 2023, ChatGPT had not been publicly announced yet. ChatGPT was announced publicly a couple of weeks later. Literally a couple of weeks later.
We are talking about November 2022. By that time, ODATA had around 45 to 50 megawatts of operating capacity and had almost 140 megawatts of contracted capacity, contracts that were already in-house and were being developed. It was a very successful experience. What happened in 2023 after ChatGPT was launched was that the AI scenario really turned the data center capacity demand on its heads because things were already growing, but they started to grow faster enough, faster yet. During 2023, I started talking to the Patria team, and they invited me to come back to the firm to lead this new thesis of, hey, what can we do about the AI world and the large-scale data centers now? At the beginning of 2024, we started the development of our new thesis.
We worked a good part of a year in, I call stealth mode, not really saying what we were doing, but just gathering the thesis, talking to potential off-takers, potential energy partners, developing projects. By the beginning of 2025, we announced the creation of our new platform, which is Omnia Data Centers. We launched Omnia Data Centers by the beginning of 2025. I am the CEO of Omnia. During 2025 or this period, we really successfully developed not only a good energy partnership but also attracted a global hyperscaler to Brazil. At the end of 2025, we announced Latin America's largest data center project, which is Omnia's first project, which is a 200 megawatts data center for ByteDance in the northeast of Brazil. It is going to be the first large global data center base installed in Brazil. This is where we are right now.
We are in the middle of construction. We have a plan of expanding again to all of Latin America, looking at the usual suspects there, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and obviously Brazil as the key focus for the company. We are replicating the story here from zero. We are, again, at the forefront of what is happening in terms of large-scale data center development in Latin America here.
Thank you. One thing that I am really curious about is when we look at data center deployment around the world, obviously it has been very centered around the U.S.
Yep. Why is Latin America a good place to build a hyperscaler data center?
What are the attributes that we have in Brazil or in other places that make it a place where, yes, of course, it makes sense to build a data center there?
Well, Cristiano Souza, there are several factors that ended up developing over this time. You are right, the U.S. continues to be and will likely remain the key focus for data center investment. If you look at the overall global data center capacity today, hovering around 100 gigawatts, give or take. The U.S. concentrates more than half of it, which is incredible. But in the end, several things started to happen, which actually benefits Latin America and call for the needs to decentralize a little bit global data center deployments. They were first, just the sheer magnitude of growth that is going to happen. We are talking about the most conservative projections, talk about the growing of the data center capacity in the next four or five years, multiplied by three, to get to close to 300 gigawatts globally. It is virtually impossible to grow everything in the U.S. for several reasons.
The power required to do so, obviously, every time more is the key component. It always was the key component, but every time more is the key component of this equation because it needs to be installed at high voltage, high capacity developments where you at once deploy 300 megawatts, 500 megawatts, one gigawatt project in terms of power requirements. This is not easy nor fast, especially in a country such as the U.S. where the grid is not integrated. So developing these large power projects in the U.S. is very time-consuming. They have been growing, they will continue to grow, but some projects can take five, seven years. Projects started to spread across the globe. There was a global base developed in Southeast Asia, in Malaysia. There were projects developed in Ireland. Obviously, the projects in Europe already existed. They continued to expand. All of the hyperscalers realized that they need to diversify this geographic positioning of new capacity for data centers globally.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Continue the full translated transcript in StockNow.
Access every statement, the English original, and speaker-by-speaker history with StockNow Pro.
View the full transcript with ProCall participants
3 people spoke on this call — only 2 are shown here.
PARTICIPANT LIST
View participant details in StockNow.
Log in to see executives and analysts, their roles, and complete speaking history.
Log in to view all participantsKeep exploring