Pranav Hotkar
Porto Alegre, Brazil - January 23, 2026 - Brazilian digital infrastructure company V.tal has unveiled plans to develop a new international subsea cable linking Brazil and the United States, alongside the construction of a new data center in Porto Alegre, as part of a broader strategy to integrate connectivity and data processing infrastructure across the region.
The subsea system, named Synapse, was announced at the PTC 2025 conference in Honolulu and is designed to span approximately 9,700 kilometers, connecting Tuckerton, New Jersey, to São Paulo, Brazil. The cable will feature 16 fiber pairs and use space division multiplexing (SDM) technology to support growing hyperscale, cloud, and AI-driven traffic between North and South America.
V.tal said the Synapse system is expected to include a future branching unit near Fortaleza, allowing direct integration with its existing cable landing infrastructure and the Mega Lobster (TFOR3) data center. Construction is scheduled to begin in the second half of 2026, with the system targeted to enter service between 2029 and 2030, subject to regulatory approvals and final investment decisions.
In parallel, V.tal subsidiary Tecto Data Centers plans to invest ~USD 37 million to develop a 20-megawatt data center in Porto Alegre, marking the company’s first major facility in southern Brazil. The project, known as TPOA1, will be located in the Sarandi district on a site already owned by Tecto.
The Porto Alegre facility will be delivered in phases, with an initial 3 MW of capacity expected to come online in the fourth quarter of 2026, following the retrofit of an existing warehouse structure. Full build-out to 20 MW will occur over subsequent phases based on customer demand. Tecto said the data center will operate on 100% renewable energy and use a closed-loop air-cooling system, eliminating water consumption during operations.
The site will be connected to V.tal’s broader fiber and subsea ecosystem, including the Malbec submarine cable system, which links Brazil and Argentina and is being extended to Porto Alegre. The integration is intended to provide low-latency connectivity for cloud providers, digital platforms, and enterprise customers in southern Brazil and neighboring markets.
Industry observers note that V.tal’s combined investment in subsea connectivity and regional data centers reflects a growing trend among infrastructure providers to pair international bandwidth with localized compute capacity, particularly as AI workloads and data localization requirements increase across Latin America.
