US cloud services provider Vultr is investing heavily in new GPUs and CPUs to reinforce and upgrade its Latin American computing infrastructure.
At the same time, the company is looking for opportunities to service and supply so-called sovereign cloud initiatives by local governments.
“We’d love to provide sovereign cloud infrastructure for the Brazilian government, and for others across the region,” Kevin Cochrane, Vultr’s head of innovation, told BNamericas.
“This is very much in line with the new US policy, with the government promoting US cloud providers like Vultr to be able to provide sovereign cloud infrastructure to different countries around the globe,” he added.
With an estimated valuation of US$3.5bn in December 2024, Vultr serves over 1.5mn customers in 185 countries.
Its main competitors in the cloud computing space include Digital Ocean and Linode, but the company really takes on public cloud players Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Other competitors, particularly for managed cloud hosting, include Scala Hosting, Cloudways and Known Host.
Cochrane said Vultr offers sovereign cloud “on demand,” and that this service is set to be a major growth driver for the group heading into 2026.
Vultr, he said, can take its entire “control plane,” which governs the company’s worldwide resources, and “clone” it anywhere to deploy for countries in any of its other data center regions. Each data center region, he added, can operate as its own independent autonomous network.
Vultr is not a data center operator. This means its regions are hosted inside third-party data centers, which in Latin America mostly belong to Digital Realty (Ascenty) and Equinix.
Brazil is already carrying out a sovereign cloud project, for which government-controlled data processing services Serpro and Dataprev signed contracts and are teaming up with public cloud players Oracle, AWS, Google and Huawei.
Under Brazil’s proposal, the technology offered by these companies will be housed within Serpro and Dataprev data centers.
Compute investment
Regarding its computing investments, Vultr is buying Nvidia GPUs and doubling down and deploying AMD GPUs at the same time, as well as upgrading its global fleet of CPUs.
That includes Latin America.
“It’s important to note that when you’re deploying an AI-native application, there’s still a requirement for a CPU. CPUs still matter,” said Cochrane.
The funds to back this spending spree come from two major sources. In December 2024, the company saw its first-ever growth financing, raising equity worth US$333mn led by investment firm LuminArx Capital Management, with a minority investment by semiconductor company AMD.
In June, Vultr raised another US$349mn in debt financing, with a pool led by Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
Expansions on hold
At present, Brazil, Mexico and Chile are Vultr’s priorities when it comes to customers and data centers.
But in 2023, the company considered launching at least three data center operations in Latin America, starting with Panama and Colombia.
However, additional data center expansion plans were put on hold because of the focus on buying GPUs and enhancing AI cloud infrastructure, but this process could resume, depending on demand from local developers and ecosystem, said Cochrane.
“We’re paying really close attention to, obviously, more data center build-outs in Brazil. We’re always keeping an eye on additional site locations in Brazil. We’re also looking closely at places like Colombia, and also looking at Panama, Costa Rica,” said the executive.
Megaport
In the coming weeks, Vultr will announce a partnership with Australian cloud services provider Megaport in Latin America.
“We’re going to be heading down to São Paulo and Mexico City in about a month and organizing a customer event in both cities with Megaport, basically highlighting our new Direct Connect advantage. That’s a big announcement,” said Cochrane.
Megaport will connect Vultr’s infrastructure with its Direct Connect service, so that a company can get direct links between the GPU and CPU clusters in Vultr’s data center infrastructure with its own corporate data center, Cochrane added.
Megaport will also help Vultr to connect an unnamed company that has a hybrid multi-cloud deployment to all its existing cloud service providers.
“We’re really excited about the relationship with Megaport and working with them very closely in the Latin American region specifically.”
Last November, Megaport announced the start of its operations in Brazil, with points-of-presence (PoPs) hosted at the data centers of Equinix, Elea Data Centers and Takoda.
These PoPs were deployed across four locations: Equinix’s SP2 and SP4 sites, Elea’s SP01 and Takoda’s SP1, all in the São Paulo metropolitan area.
In March, Megaport also announced a partnership with Angola Cables.
In Mexico, the Australian group relies on a PoP hosted at Kio‘s QRO1 data center in Querétaro.
Tariffs
Asked about the impacts of US tariffs and potential retaliations, Cochrane said: “We’re not so concerned about what’s going on with tariffs. What we’re more concerned about is how we help accelerate national governments around the globe to start standing up their own sovereign cloud infrastructure, so that national governments can make core cloud compute available to research institutions, higher education institutions, and make it available more broadly to fuel the next generation of digital startups.”