U.S. tech firm CloudHQ will invest an estimated US $4.8 billion to build six data centers and complementary infrastructure on a single site in Querétaro, a company executive said Thursday.
Keith Harney, CloudHQ’s chief operating officer, announced the investment at President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Thursday morning press conference.
“Our site in Querétaro is 52 hectares and we will be building six data centers, most likely for cloud compute and AI and it will be up to 900 megawatts of critical IT load,” he said.
The project was first announced in 2023, at which time CloudHQ said that the investment would be $3.6 billion.
The data center campus is “in close proximity to Querétaro Airport and will be the biggest data center campus in Mexico designed to accommodate 6 buildings of 48MW of IT load powered by an onsite substation,” according to the CloudHQ website.
Querétaro Airport is located about 25 kilometers east of Querétaro city.
Harney described the project as a “hyper-scale data center campus in Querétaro,” a state that has become a data center hub due to factors including its central location in Mexico and a growing electricity supply.
He said that it is anticipated that construction of the data centers will create “7,200 highly-skilled construction jobs.”
The campus — which will have its own 900-megawatt substation — is expected to be completed in 2027. Once operational it should provide 900 permanent jobs, and create off-campus jobs as well, according to the CloudHQ executive.
Harney said that CloudHQ “is respectful of sustainable design” and highlighted that the data centers will be equipped with “waterless cooling” infrastructure. Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard said that campus’s water usage will be “very low.”
However, there are concerns about the impact data centers will have on water supply in Querétaro, which, like many states in Mexico, has faced significant water stress in recent years.
Google and Microsoft are among the companies that already have data centers in the Bajío region state.
Harney noted that CloudHQ is “one of the largest data center developers in the world” and leases the facilities it builds to “the world’s largest technological companies.”
The companies that lease the data centers make their own significant investments in the facilities, he said.
“The capital investment I shared with you is our cost. We rent our space to our customers. Our customers will make a capital investment into the property to make it ready for their business,” Harney said.
“Typically that investment could be three to five times the cost of our building, and that would be for a cloud compute and if that was AI it would be significantly higher. So as you can see, [there will be] significant capital investment,” he said.
“… Our customers ultimately determine what they will use the space for but we’re highly confident that this space will be used for cloud compute and AI, so artificial intelligence,” Harney said.
“… We are pleased to be playing a supporting role in enhancing the digital economy for Mexico,” he added.
Sheinbaum said that investment in data centers is “important for Mexico,” explaining that it gives the country “the capacity to process data related to artificial intelligence and information technology.”
“We also need these investments to bring benefits for the community,” she said.
Ebrard highlighted that “practically all the services in our daily lives will be connected to these kinds of data centers.”
“… That’s why [the investment] is very important — because of its amount, the number of jobs [it will create] and the effect it will have,” he said.
CloudHQ’s data center campus in detail
Harney provided a range of other details about CloudHQ’s project in Querétaro. He said that:
- CloudHQ has collaborated with authorities in Querétaro on “the land and pre-development process” since 2021.
- Cloud HQ has also collaborated with the Federal Electricity Commission and the National Energy Control Center to “secure initial power” for the company’s campus and “will continue to collaborate as we upsize capacity.”
- Cloud HQ will “seek to secure a long-term anchor tenant” for the data center campus.
- CloudHQ is building a separate “2-gigawatt maneuvering substation” to provide power to the data centers.
- CloudHQ will rely on “the Mexican supply chain as much as we can” while building the data centers.
- The campus site is “just west” of the Querétaro Airport.
With reports from El Economista and Reuters
