About Brazil
Brazil is Latin America's largest digital market and the region's principal interconnection point, with Sao Paulo concentrating carrier peering, financial systems, and enterprise workloads for much of South America. Fortaleza anchors the other half of that picture, landing most of Brazil's transatlantic subsea capacity, while Castilho extends long-haul capacity inland.
Zenlayer operates 8 data centers across three Brazilian cities, six in Sao Paulo, one in Fortaleza, and one in Castilho, covering bare metal cloud, colocation, IP transit, Cloud WAN, Cloud Connect, and CDN. Availability differs by site: IP transit reaches six sites, bare metal five, colocation, Cloud WAN, and Cloud Connect three each, CDN two, and public cloud one.
Brazil's data protection law (LGPD) and the tax treatment of imported hardware make in-country presence the practical choice for platforms serving Brazilian users. Teams typically anchor on Sao Paulo and then extend into Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, treating Brazil as the first node of a Latin American footprint rather than a North American one.
Compute in Brazil
Bare metal cloud runs in five of Zenlayer's eight Brazilian data centers, and one site adds public cloud capacity. Dedicated hardware fits this market for three practical reasons: it keeps regulated records inside Brazilian borders, it holds throughput steady for payment and video workloads, and it sits one hop from local peering instead of behind a transit path out of the country.
Fintech and payment platforms take capacity here to keep processing and records domestic. Streaming operators place origin and transcode capacity close to Brazilian eyeball networks. Studios running multiplayer titles hold session times down for players across Brazil and the neighbouring markets. Where a workload has to sit beside a cloud region, the Sao Paulo sites are the ones to size first.
Enterprise hardware
Intel Xeon Scalable. Up to 384 GB RAM. NVMe and SSD storage tiers.
Premium network
100+ Tbps backbone with dynamic, latency-optimized routing.
Instant provisioning
Deploy via Terraform, REST API, or the point-and-click zenConsole.
Flexible billing
Hourly pay-as-you-go with discounts for longer commitments.
Networking in Brazil
IP transit is the most widely available network service in Brazil, live at six of the eight data centers, with Cloud WAN and Cloud Connect at three each and CDN at two. The Sao Paulo sites carry the densest mix and sit on IX.br, the exchange that handles the largest share of domestic Brazilian traffic, so routes to Brazilian ISPs, content networks, and carriers stay inside the country rather than looping abroad.
Cloud Connect supplies private circuits from those sites into cloud environments, keeping enterprise traffic off the public internet. Cloud WAN links the Brazilian footprint into Zenlayer's global software-defined backbone. Fortaleza then changes the shape of anything leaving Brazil: capacity landing there runs east across the South Atlantic instead of north through the United States.
IP Transit
Blended carrier routes tuned for the lowest real-world latency.
Cloud Connect
Private, dedicated links into AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle.
Cloud WAN
Software-defined backbone spanning 290+ points of presence.
Edge protection
Layer 3 and 4 DDoS mitigation with real-time traffic filtering.
Colocation in Brazil
Colocation is available at three of Zenlayer's eight Brazilian data centers, with inventory weighted toward Sao Paulo where six of the eight sites sit. Facilities carry certifications including ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and NIST 800-53/FISMA, which covers the audit requirements financial and healthcare platforms bring.
The real constraint in Brazil is getting hardware into the country, where import duties, customs clearance, and certification can add weeks to a self-supplied build. Many teams therefore start on Zenlayer-supplied bare metal in Sao Paulo and add racks later, using Castilho for inland capacity and Fortaleza for gear that belongs near the cable landings.
Carrier-neutral
Access to 400+ carriers and major regional peering exchanges.
Flexible power
Standard and high-density rack configurations on request.
Secure access
Biometric entry, CCTV, and 24/7 dedicated remote hands.
Rapid turn-up
Cage-to-production cross-connects in days, not weeks.
Cities in Brazil
Sao Paulo
SAOBrazil's financial capital and South America's primary cloud and peering gateway.
Castilho
GIGSão Paulo state landing point covering Brazil's Atlantic coast and subsea corridors into Rio.
Fortaleza
FORBrazilian subsea cable hub routing traffic between South America, Europe, and West Africa.
Data Centers in Brazil
8 totalSao Paulo
Brazil's financial capital and South America's primary cloud and peering gateway.
6 DCs
Sao Paulo
Brazil's financial capital and South America's primary cloud and peering gateway.
| Services | ||
|---|---|---|
| SA-São Paulo1(Equinix_SP2)SAO1 |  | ColoIP TransitCloud WANCloud Connect |
| SA-São Paulo2(Equinix_SP3)SAO2 | | ColoBMCIP TransitCloud WANCloud ConnectCDN |
| SA-São Paulo3(Equinix_SP4)SAO3 | | ColoBMCIP Transit |
| SA-São Paulo4 (Ascenty-SP3)SAO4 |  | ColoBMCIP TransitCloud WANCloud Connect |
| SA-São Paulo5(Ascenty-SP4)SAO5 | | Colo |
| SA-São Paulo6(ODATA_SP01)SAO6 |  | Colo |
Castilho
São Paulo state landing point covering Brazil's Atlantic coast and subsea corridors into Rio.
1 DC
Castilho
São Paulo state landing point covering Brazil's Atlantic coast and subsea corridors into Rio.
| Services | ||
|---|---|---|
| SA-Rio de Janeiro1(Equinix_RJ2)GIG1 | | ColoBMCIP TransitCDN |
Fortaleza
Brazilian subsea cable hub routing traffic between South America, Europe, and West Africa.
1 DC
Fortaleza
Brazilian subsea cable hub routing traffic between South America, Europe, and West Africa.
| Services | ||
|---|---|---|
| SA-Fortaleza1(Globenet Fortaleza CLS)FOR1 | Globenet Cabos Submarionos America | ColoBMCIP Transit |
FAQs
Common questions about deploying compute, networking, and colocation infrastructure in Brazil.
Where are Zenlayer's data centers located across Brazil?
<p>Zenlayer operates 8 data centers in Brazil across three cities: Sao Paulo (6), Fortaleza (1), and Castilho (1). Sao Paulo holds most of the inventory because it concentrates carrier peering and enterprise demand, Fortaleza is where Brazil's transatlantic subsea cables come ashore, and Castilho provides inland capacity away from the metro.</p>
What cloud and network services are available in Brazil?
<p>Availability differs by site. Across the eight Brazilian data centers, IP transit is available at six, bare metal cloud (BMC) at five, edge colocation at three, Cloud WAN at three, Cloud Connect at three, CDN at two, and public cloud at one. Sao Paulo carries the widest combination of these services, so most multi-service deployments in Brazil start there.</p>
Should teams deploy in Sao Paulo or Fortaleza for Brazil?
<p>It depends on the workload. Sao Paulo suits anything serving Brazilian users or interconnecting with local carriers, clouds, and financial networks, and it holds six of the eight data centers. Fortaleza suits traffic crossing the Atlantic, since the subsea systems toward Europe and Africa come ashore there. Workloads that do both commonly pair the two.</p>
How do the Fortaleza cable landings change routing out of Brazil?
<p>Brazilian international traffic has historically reached Europe by way of the United States. The systems landing at Fortaleza opened direct South Atlantic paths toward Portugal and West Africa, which removes a North American leg. For platforms serving both Brazil and Europe, terminating in Fortaleza rather than backhauling north cuts round-trip time and reduces exposure to North Atlantic congestion.</p>
Which other Latin American markets does Zenlayer operate in?
<p>Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru all carry Zenlayer infrastructure, and most Latin American builds start in Brazil before adding one of them. The reason is density rather than geography: Sao Paulo holds the peering, cloud on-ramps, and enterprise demand that the other markets connect back to. A common pattern is to run the origin and control plane in Sao Paulo, then place delivery capacity in whichever market the users actually sit in.</p>
Deploy Infrastructure in Brazil
Talk with Zenlayer to design a Brazil deployment that pairs Sao Paulo peering and cloud on-ramps with the Fortaleza subsea landings and inland capacity at Castilho.