As Capacity reported, within six weeks of the accord's launch 70 companies had signed up, publicly committing to track and reduce the environmental impact of data centres and a establishing "a new level of responsibility on carbon emissions".
That milestone was confirmed during Datacloud Global, which took place in Monaco last month and members include Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Meta.
Now Scala is officially part of the group, CEO Marcos Peigo (pictured) said its membership would "bring more support to the company's sustainable initiatives". Scala already run its hyperscaler portfolio in Brazil on 100% renewable energy and says it has pioneered the "achievement of carbon neutrality certification since its foundation".
Microsoft’s Christian Belady told Capacity last month that the iMasons Climate Accord “is an open standard to report carbon in materials and power and to report embodied carbon in data centre buildings.” The accord “will take account of all products in a data centre through its life, including the carbon intensity of its power consumption.”
It is already developing solutions and presenting project definitions to reduce the environmental impacts of data centres.
One involves tackling the long-standing issue of how to measure the efficiency of facilities beyond Energy Use Effectiveness (PUE) and Water Use Effectiveness (WUE). It will see the creation of a method to measure and report the carbon footprint of everything being used in a data centre such as energy, materials, and other inputs.
Peigo said: “These metrics are widely used to attest to energy efficiency and water use in data centres and the industry is always looking to improve these rates. Therefore, creating a similar standard to measure carbon emissions is essential to guide processes towards the reduction.”
Scala was founded by DigitalBridge in April 2020 – then known as Digital Colony – through the acquisition of assets belonging to UOL Diveo. The deal marked Digital Colony’s second investment in Brazil and its fourth in Latin America, after acquiring Highline do Brasil in 2019, Andean Telecom Partners in 2017 and Mexico Towers Partners in 2013 through its affiliate Digital Bridge.
Peigo, who was then an operating partner at Digital Colony, was appointed CEO of Scala, which operates based on 100% renewable and certified energy and guarantees PUE of less than 1.4 in its current and future data centres. The global benchmark stands at 1.59, and the Latin America average is 1.77, according to figures from the Uptime Institute.
Scala's SP4 and SP5 facilities, both in the state of Sao Paulo, are due to go live in April and September of 2022, respectively. SP4 will be the largest vertical data centre in Latin America and Scala's second greenfield project, totalling 18MW of capacity. SP5 has a total planned capacity of 9MW and has been designed to meet the demands of the single-tenant market.
