Summary

  • Uptime Institute's public record gives Cotel Wave DC Tier IV Design and Constructed Facility awards, while the underlying certification letter limits the demonstrated scope to 405 kW of IT load in Data Center #1; larger 840, 900 and 2-by-450 kVA figures describe plans or equipment arrangements, not automatically usable certified load.
  • Three operational boundaries meet at the site: Cotel controls the data-centre service, Zonamerica controls the free-zone campus and its access, common areas and local infrastructure, and utilities and carriers control the external paths that bring electricity and traffic to the property.
  • Public evidence supports a real operating facility with redundant electrical and cooling components, but it does not disclose independent utility substations, mapped fibre entrances, current sold load, failure-state capacity, fuel replenishment rights or a jointly tested campus-wide recovery sequence.

The first handoff is outside the white room

The most revealing place at Zonamerica Cali is not a rack aisle. It is the handoff between the campus utility yard and the electrical rooms serving the data centre. Early in the morning, before the heat loads rise and office traffic fills the southern approach to Cali, an engineer standing there would be able to ask the question that the sales language tends to blur: which part of this chain is actually protected by the Tier IV certificate?

On one side are utility conductors, switchgear, generators, fuel, external heat-rejection equipment and the low-rise campus around them. On the other are the uninterruptible power supplies, distribution boards and cooling units that keep computing equipment within environmental limits. Fibre makes a similar crossing. A conduit can enter the property by one road reserve, split inside a chamber and appear at two data-hall panels without ever becoming two geographically independent outside routes. Conversely, two carriers can share no commercial relationship yet lease strands in the same duct.

Counting logos or panels does not answer the physical question.

The current data-centre operator identifies its address as Calle 36 No. 128-321, inside Zonamerica, on its contact page. That establishes a public operating location, not the precise coordinates of the utility handoff, generator yard, cooling plant or carrier chambers. Zonamerica's own technology and connectivity page describes redundant routes, access to major telecom operators, a double electrical connection of more than 1.5 MVA and an IT load of 2 by 420 kVA. These are material statements, but the page does not provide a single-line electrical drawing or a geographically precise fibre plan.

That absence is not a pedantic gap. Tenants in a free zone may have operations, equipment and staff that cannot be moved to an ordinary office across town in the middle of an incident. A customer may replicate data to Bogotá or another country, yet still depend on the Cali site for local applications, contact-centre traffic, security systems or the network handoff that makes replication useful. The data hall can remain electrically sound while a shared campus switchboard, fibre corridor, gate decision or flooded access route prevents service or repair.

The initial failure sequence therefore starts outside the rack. A utility disturbance makes the facility transfer to stored energy and generation. A generator then depends on starting systems, fuel quality, ventilation and a route for replenishment. Cooling depends on power and on outdoor equipment continuing to reject heat. Fibre depends on the integrity of ducts, chambers and carrier equipment beyond the property. Recovery depends on people being admitted, diagnosed, supplied and authorized to work.

None of this negates Tier IV engineering. It locates it. The certificate is strong evidence about a defined facility configuration and demonstrated IT load. It is not a force field around the campus. The difference between those two propositions is the difference between a credible continuity design and an unlimited promise.

One address contains three operating boundaries

The name in the directory is ZONAMERICA USUARIO OPERADOR DE ZONA FRANCA S.A.S., not Cotel SAS and not the former Etix operation. The legal distinction is visible in Zonamerica's published campus regulation. It says DIAN Resolution 5136 of 2 July 2014 declared the permanent free zone and authorized Zonamerica as its user-operator. It describes the operator's functions as directing, administering, supervising, promoting and developing the zone, while controlling admission and departure of goods under customs control.

National law supplies the wider boundary. Article 73 of Colombia's Decree 2147 of 2016 gives a free-zone user-operator responsibility for administration, supervision, user qualification, common-area services and compliance with the customs regime. The campus regulation applies that authority to access notifications, random inspections of people and vehicles, security coordination, traffic, works and maintenance. Zonamerica can provide some services directly or through third parties. A qualified user can arrange private security or maintenance inside its premises, but it still operates within campus rules and must coordinate changes that affect shared systems.

That makes Zonamerica more than a landlord, but less than the sole operator of every technical asset on the site. Its Cali Chamber of Commerce profile presents the company as the developer and operator of the business campus. The data-centre service, by contrast, is currently marketed by Wave DC and associated with Cotel. A separate Chamber profile for Cotel Wave DC lists colocation formats such as racks, cages and private rooms at the Zonamerica address.

The distinction changed over time. A legacy Zonamerica article still calls the campus facility an Etix-operated neutral Tier IV data centre (the older data-centre benefits page). A sponsored Portafolio report from August 2024 says Grupo Cotel acquired the facility formerly known as Etix Cali and renamed it Wave DC (the acquisition account). A Forbes interview published the following month similarly describes Cotel's purchase of the former Etix site from a foreign company (the Cotel interview). Both are useful evidence of the operator transition, though each relays the buyer's account rather than disclosing the full sale agreement.

There are therefore at least three practical boundaries. Cotel, through Wave DC, sells and runs the data-centre service. Zonamerica governs the free-zone property, its gates, common areas and shared campus services. Electricity distributors, fuel suppliers and telecom carriers control assets and performance beyond those boundaries. A fourth boundary may exist within each customer cage: the operator can supply power and connectivity while the customer remains responsible for server configuration, application failover and remote access.

During an ordinary service request, these boundaries are manageable. During a compound incident, they become a chain of command. A Wave technician may diagnose loss of an incoming feed, but Zonamerica may control access to a common electrical area. A carrier may need to open a chamber on shared land. A fuel truck may need admission under security and free-zone procedures. A tenant may need an emergency part brought through a customs-controlled gate. The recovery clock includes every handoff.

Public material does not publish a joint responsibility matrix for these events. It does not identify who can order a campus-wide electrical isolation, who has priority for fuel delivery, whether carrier technicians have standing emergency access, or which party communicates one account of the incident to tenants. The legal documents show that Zonamerica has real authority; the facility materials show that Wave has real technical duties. The missing evidence is how those authorities are rehearsed together.

The 405-kilowatt fact changes the capacity story

Zonamerica's capacity story has accumulated several numbers, each describing a different moment or boundary. In May 2018, Data Center Dynamics reported a plan by Etix Everywhere and Compunet for a two-phase, 840 kVA, 240-rack facility inside the campus (the original announcement). When construction began in 2019, the same publication repeated the 840 kVA and 240-rack full-build figures and said the project would be carrier-neutral (the groundbreaking report). Those reports establish the development intention. They do not establish what was energized, accepted or sold.

The physical design supports the idea of a staged build. An architectural case study describes a roughly 4,000-square-metre plot with a reinforced-concrete technical volume and a separate office volume (the project description). Wave's current facility page markets a 1,920-square-metre building, 800 square metres of IT space, 240 racks and 900 kVA of IT capacity. Zonamerica's current technology page uses another formulation: 2 by 420 kVA, 2 by 300 square metres and 2 by 120 racks. A Wave presentation to the regional academic network describes 2 by 450 kVA, 2 by 400 square metres and 2 by 120 racks (the RUAV presentation).

These figures are not necessarily contradictory. One may be nominal equipment rating, one marketed IT capacity, one earlier design, and one rounded phase total. Floor area can mean gross technical space, white space or a particular pair of rooms. A rack count is a slot inventory, not a power measure: 120 racks at 2 kW each require a different plant from 120 racks at 8 kW each. A kVA rating is apparent power and cannot be converted into deliverable IT kilowatts without power factor, reserve policy, losses and operating conditions.

The most important capacity evidence is unusually specific. A public procurement submission contains an Uptime Institute certification letter for the Cali facility (the document containing the certification letter). The letter says demonstrations took place on 5 and 6 October 2020, with on-site verification completed on 4 November 2020. It states that the certification is limited to the as-demonstrated total IT load of 405 kW in Data Center #1. It also says the certification superseded the earlier Etix-named certificate and remains valid only while the facility is not modified in a way that affects the certified infrastructure.

That sentence supplies the dividing line the larger marketing numbers lack. Four hundred and five kilowatts is not proof of current customer load, available capacity or maximum safe load. It is the IT load within the configuration that Uptime says was demonstrated. Nor does it mean the second phase is absent. It means that a buyer cannot take an 840, 900 or 2-by-450 kVA figure and assume all of it has the same demonstrated status.

Capacity should be separated into at least six states. Designed capacity is what drawings and selected equipment aim to support. Installed capacity is what is physically present. Energized capacity is what can receive power. Accepted capacity has completed the operator's commissioning requirements. Sold capacity is committed to customers. Usable capacity is what can be delivered while preserving the required reserve. Failure-state usable capacity is what remains after the largest relevant component or path is unavailable.

Only some of those states are public here. The early reports establish a two-phase design ambition. Operator materials describe equipment and space. The Uptime letter establishes a 405 kW demonstrated certification boundary. No reviewed public record gives the current metered IT load, contracted load, unsold headroom, rack-level density distribution or capacity that remains after a utility feed, generator, UPS, cooling path or carrier entrance is removed from service.

This is why “900 kVA data centre” is not an answer to a resilience question. If a buyer needs 100 kW, the relevant questions are whether that load fits within the commissioned and certified portion, whether the reserve remains intact, and whether cooling and generation can sustain it during the specified failure. The headline number is an invitation to ask those questions, not a substitute for the answers.

Tier IV is strong evidence with a defined edge

Uptime Institute's current Colombia awards page lists Cotel SAS, Cotel Wave DC, with Tier IV Certification of Design Documents and Tier IV Certification of Constructed Facility (the Colombia award record). The specific Cotel Wave DC award page associates the current Cotel name with the former Etix Cali #1 description. This is stronger evidence than an operator simply calling itself Tier IV: it is a third-party record for a named facility.

The award types matter. Design certification evaluates the documents. Constructed Facility certification tests whether the built facility performs according to the certified design under observed demonstrations. Uptime's explanation of the Tier system describes Tier IV as fault tolerant, with redundant capacity components and multiple independent, physically isolated distribution paths. That is a demanding standard within the assessed facility boundary.

The public award record does not list an M&O Stamp of Approval for Cotel Wave DC. Zonamerica's technology page nevertheless describes Uptime certification for design, construction and operation. The safest reading is not to accuse either party of misstatement, but to distinguish the evidence: Uptime's current public record visibly supports Design and Constructed Facility awards; it does not visibly show an operations award for this facility. A buyer seeking the broader claim should request the current award documents and exact scope.

The 405 kW letter adds two further cautions. First, a Tier IV facility is not immune to every human error. The letter explains that the demonstrated arrangement permits planned work and an unplanned event without interrupting more than the redundant computer-room power and cooling systems, while also warning that operating mistakes can affect critical load. Redundancy provides choices; it does not make every switch action correct.

Second, the certificate follows the assessed configuration. Material changes require review. The operator transition from Etix to Cotel does not itself erase a physical certification, and the letter appears to have been revised to reflect the naming change. Yet any later expansion, replacement, control change or new room should be matched against the certified drawings and change history. The current award page shows continuity of the facility record, not a public inventory of every modification since November 2020.

The edge of the certificate is also spatial. It can validate independent distribution paths inside the facility without proving that two utility services originate at separate substations. It can validate internal power continuity without certifying the fuel supplier's road. It can test cooling responses without guaranteeing that every external drainage route remains clear. It can observe carrier handoffs only to the extent they form part of the assessed facility; it cannot certify a carrier's national backbone or submarine-cable landing.

Tier IV should therefore increase confidence, not end inquiry. It tells a buyer that 405 kW in Data Center #1 was subjected to a serious design and constructed-facility assessment. The buyer's remaining job is to trace every required service from that certified edge to its next common point of failure.

Power begins with two feeds and ends with fuel

The public electrical account begins with Zonamerica's statement of a double electrical connection exceeding 1.5 MVA. The RUAV presentation goes further, describing three independent electrical routes, three generators with 48 hours of fuel, three uninterruptible power supplies with eight minutes of battery autonomy, and three distribution boards. In the same presentation, the facility is shown as a 2N distributed design. If accurate and current, that is a substantial internal resilience arrangement.

Each phrase still needs a boundary. “Double connection” can mean two commercial services, two feeder cables, two switchboard incomers or two substations. “Three routes” can mean physically separated conductors inside the property or truly diverse paths back into the utility network. The public materials do not name the substations, feeders, voltages, points of common coupling or route coordinates. They do not say whether one upstream transformer, protection zone or roadside corridor can remove both services.

Generation moves the dependency rather than eliminating it. Three machines may provide capacity and maintenance reserve, but the effective result depends on the largest failure the design is meant to tolerate, the load carried, starting reliability, synchronisation, emissions controls and cooling. Forty-eight hours of fuel is a stated autonomy figure, not a guarantee of 48 hours at every load and ambient condition. Tank usable volume, generator consumption curves, minimum reserve, fuel age and periodic load testing would be needed to reproduce it.

The campus has other generating assets, but they should not be merged with the data-centre system. A supplier case study says Cummins diesel sets rated at 770 and 963 kVA were provided for the Zonamerica free zone (the Genmaq project page). The page does not say those machines are dedicated to Wave DC, remain in the same configuration, or form part of the certified 405 kW chain. They are evidence that the wider campus has invested in standby generation, not evidence of extra data-centre reserve.

Solar power requires the same discipline. In April 2026, El Tiempo reported a Terpel Sunex project for Zonamerica comprising an operating first phase of 880 panels and a second phase intended to bring the campus total to 1,744 panels and 1.1 MWp, supplying an estimated 42 per cent of campus consumption (the solar project report). This is meaningful energy infrastructure and may reduce daytime grid purchases. It is not stated to be island-capable backup for the data centre, and annual megawatt-hours do not translate into guaranteed power during a grid failure.

A November 2023 Zonamerica institutional brochure describes campus electrical maintenance and energy redundancy as shared services. That reinforces the interdependence between facility and campus. If a common medium-voltage asset requires intervention, Wave's internal design may keep the load running while Zonamerica or its contractor performs the work. The duration of that bridge depends on fuel and cooling, while the quality of recovery depends on coordination.

The credible failure sequence is therefore staged. Batteries carry the IT load through the transfer interval. Generators start and accept load. Cooling remains supported. The failed feed is isolated. Fuel stock is monitored. If the utility event persists, deliveries must cross the city and enter the free zone. If a generator or a cooling path also fails, the remaining plant must still carry the certified load without reserve being silently consumed by expansion.

No public evidence reviewed here discloses the latest integrated load-bank test, black-building test, fuel replenishment contract, on-site tank volume, delivery priority, water dependency, or the current load used to calculate 48 hours. These are not reasons to assume failure. They are the evidence needed to turn an equipment list into a recovery claim.

Cooling is redundant only while heat can leave

Electrical continuity attracts the badge, but heat decides how long a running room remains usable. Servers turn nearly every kilowatt they consume into heat. If IT power stays on while cooling stops, the room's thermal margin can disappear far faster than generator fuel. A facility can therefore survive a utility failure electrically and still lose service through the cooling chain.

The RUAV presentation describes three independent cooling paths, three groups of four variable-speed condensers and three computer-room air handlers. It also gives a target power usage effectiveness of 1.70 at 70 per cent load. These details are more useful than a generic redundancy statement because they identify components and an operating point. They still do not disclose which valves, controls, headers or external power sources are shared.

The outdoor side matters especially in Cali. Condensers must reject heat into warm ambient air; fouling, fan failure and blocked airflow change their capacity. Controls must sequence equipment correctly during power transfer. Sensors and dampers must not create a hidden common failure. Maintenance access must remain safe during heavy rain. If the hall load grows toward the designed second phase, the operator must show that both electrical and thermal reserve grow with it.

The PUE target also needs its denominator. A value quoted at 70 per cent load is not a current measured annual result. Efficiency changes with IT utilization, weather and the share of fixed overhead. Nor does an efficient normal state prove resilience: extra pumps, fans or condensers may need to run during a degraded state, raising facility demand just when generator reserve is most valuable.

Wave's current site markets a 24-hour operations centre and remote-hands service, while the Zonamerica brochure describes campus air-conditioning and electrical repair support. Together they suggest a staffed path from alarm to intervention. They do not disclose response times for a failed condenser, critical spares held on site, control-system recovery, or whether the campus and data-centre teams use the same incident priorities.

A buyer should therefore ask for a thermal demonstration, not only a component diagram. The useful evidence is the maximum certified IT load maintained after the specified cooling component or path is removed, under a stated ambient condition, for long enough to observe stable temperatures. That number may be 405 kW; it may differ under later changes. The public record does not settle it.

Carrier neutral does not mean route diverse

Zonamerica calls the facility neutral and multicarrier. Its 2023 brochure describes a neutral data centre, multiple national and international operators and an internet-exchange node. An El País commercial feature said the campus had more than 12 telecom operators and listed a range of tenant companies (the campus feature). Portafolio named Claro, Telefónica and Tigo as examples of carriers available to Wave customers. These statements support commercial choice. They do not reveal how many independent fibre approaches reach the building.

The free-zone operator itself holds an autonomous-system number. LACNIC's AS266747 record identifies the registrant handle CO-ZUOZ-LACNIC, and its registrant record gives the formal Zonamerica company name and the Calle 36 address. This proves a registered routing identity tied to the entity. It does not prove that every data-centre customer uses that AS, that Zonamerica owns the campus fibre, or that the AS has a stated bandwidth.

Public route observers provide a limited view of the logical edge. Hurricane Electric's AS266747 page showed three IPv4 prefixes, no visible IPv6 prefix and three observed peers on the research date. Cloudflare Radar's routing view gives another collector-based picture of originated space and connections. IPinfo's AS266747 summary showed two upstreams and two prefixes. The disagreement in counts is normal for services using different collectors, definitions and observation times. It is also a warning against turning any one screen into a topology.

An observed adjacency is not a carrier entrance. Two upstream AS numbers may reach one router over fibres sharing the same duct. Three public peers may include routes exchanged remotely at a facility elsewhere. A prefix count says nothing about throughput, congestion or contractual restoration. The absence of visible IPv6 may reflect routing policy rather than physical incapacity. These services are useful signals that AS266747 is active in public routing; they cannot establish separate building entrances, diverse metro rings or usable failover capacity.

The phrase “Pacific route” also needs care. Uptime's facility description says the Cali site is positioned for Pacific connectivity. Colombia does have a Pacific submarine-cable landing at Buenaventura. The OECD review hosted by Colombia's communications ministry describes the South American Crossing system landing there while noting that most of the country's international cable landings are on the Caribbean coast (the national connectivity review). That national geography does not prove that a particular Wave circuit follows a physically separate route from Cali to Buenaventura, nor that two carriers avoid a shared mountain, road or long-haul provider.

The physical questions are answerable, but not from public routing tables. How many carrier chambers enter the property? From which road boundaries? How far apart are they before paths converge? Which carriers own fibre and which lease it? Are cross-connects delivered from separate meet-me rooms? Do the external routes reach separate metro nodes and long-haul exits? Can a customer buy two circuits whose contracts prohibit common conduit and common active equipment?

Carrier neutrality is still valuable. It reduces dependence on a single retail supplier and can make competitive cross-connects possible. It becomes resilience only when the selected services are engineered for diversity. Until route drawings and letters of diversity are available, the public evidence supports a multicarrier market at Zonamerica, not a quantified number of physically independent paths.

The campus is part of the availability chain

Zonamerica describes a 38-hectare free zone on the Cali-Jamundí corridor, south of the city. Its about page says the campus includes a 10,000-square-metre leasable building, parking and a long-term employment and investment programme. The internal regulation shows a larger planned frame of 18 stages, 23 buildings and 173,000 square metres. Those figures describe a business district, not a standalone data-centre compound.

The campus creates advantages. It concentrates security, facilities staff, telecom suppliers and business customers. The data centre can serve companies a short physical distance away. Remote hands can reach customer equipment without a cross-city journey. Common maintenance and controlled access can reduce casual interference. The free-zone regime can support international-service businesses and the movement of qualifying goods.

The same concentration creates shared dependencies. Cars, fuel trucks, carrier crews and spare parts use campus entrances. Common roads and electrical areas may serve multiple buildings. Security has the authority to inspect entrants and vehicles. Construction or maintenance by one user must not impair another. A restriction imposed for customs, safety or security reasons can be entirely legitimate and still lengthen technical restoration.

The public materials illustrate a split in maintenance responsibility. Zonamerica's regulation says it can arrange vigilance and maintenance of the zone while users remain responsible for their own premises and works. Its institutional brochure offers electrical repair, air-conditioning maintenance, security and other campus services. Wave sells the rack-level and room-level data-centre service. A failure at the boundary can require all three layers: campus staff to make a common area safe, Wave staff to switch or isolate equipment, and a carrier or utility crew to repair the external service.

Physical construction reinforces this distinction. The architectural project page shows the data centre as a purpose-built technical block on a campus plot, rather than a room hidden inside a general office tower. That is positive for separation and access control. It does not reveal whether its exterior conduits, drainage and power corridors remain independent once they leave the plot.

The free-zone operator's authority is part of resilience because it can accelerate or impede action. A mature arrangement would give pre-authorized emergency access to named utility and carrier teams, define after-hours customs treatment for critical spares, reserve safe staging space, and specify who can override ordinary vehicle rules during a declared incident. It would also prevent urgency from bypassing electrical and security controls.

No public document provides that emergency arrangement. The regulation establishes who governs the campus; it does not publish data-centre-specific recovery times. The correct conclusion is not that access will fail, but that campus authority belongs inside the continuity assessment rather than in a footnote about location.

Rain, drainage and the recovery road

The campus sits in a landscape where water and transport deserve the same attention as electricity. Cali's planning determination for the Zonamerica partial-plan area places it between the Cali-Jamundí road and planned urban corridors, within the Jamundí River basin (the municipal planning document). It calls for studies of runoff, drainage, flood zoning, protective works and soil conditions including liquefaction. These are planning requirements, not findings that the operating data centre is flooded or unsafe.

That distinction is essential. A planning authority asks for studies because a hazard must be characterized before development. The document does not publish the final as-built elevation of the Wave floor, generator plinths, fuel tanks, cable chambers or switchgear. It does not show the completed stormwater network or maintenance history. It therefore identifies the questions that construction had to answer, not the answers delivered by the finished site.

Regional events show why those questions are material. Colombia's Valle del Cauca environmental authority reported that intense rain in 2019 caused the Jamundí River to overtop or breach protective works and flood several sectors (the CVC event account). The report does not say Zonamerica or the data centre was affected. It establishes only that severe rainfall and river behaviour can disrupt the wider basin.

The same authority continues to monitor conditions. A June 2026 hydroclimatic bulletin discussed river-level behaviour for the Pance and Jamundí systems. Such monitoring can improve warning, but it cannot keep a blocked campus drain open or a road passable. Site resilience depends on local inspection, pumping where required, protected cable chambers, elevated critical equipment and a route for staff and supplies.

A compound event is more demanding than a simple flood scenario. Heavy rain can slow fuel delivery, reduce technician access, introduce water into a chamber and cause utility faults at the same time. A generator may start correctly while the crew needed for a carrier repair waits outside a closed road. A fibre path may remain intact while the shared chamber supplying both entrances fills with water. None of these outcomes is documented at Zonamerica; they are the combinations the site evidence makes reasonable to test.

Recovery planning should begin with geography. The operator should know which approach remains available if the Cali-Jamundí corridor is restricted, which campus gate can take a fuel vehicle, where water accumulates, and whether carrier routes leave by different road boundaries. Staff accommodation and shift relief matter if travel is interrupted. So do pumps, drain maintenance, portable lighting and the authority to excavate near controlled infrastructure.

The public record supports a site-specific hazard question but no adverse verdict. Zonamerica has operated and expanded on the property for years, and the data centre achieved a demanding constructed-facility certification. What remains unavailable is a current, independently reviewable account connecting the planning requirements to as-built drainage, equipment elevations and tested access alternatives.

Who waits when the campus fails

The affected population is not a single number. Wave's customers may occupy full rooms, cages or individual racks. Some may use Cali as their primary site; others may use it as disaster recovery for Bogotá or Medellín. Carriers may place network equipment there. Companies elsewhere on the campus may buy local connectivity or computing services. The El País feature reported BPO, technology, engineering and service businesses in the zone, but it did not identify which are Wave customers.

The consequences differ by customer. A contact centre may keep staff at their desks while losing voice and customer applications. A software company may fail over its public service while local development systems become unavailable. A regional carrier may lose a handoff affecting users well beyond the campus. A company using Wave for backup may discover that replication was current but the failover address, authentication service or last-mile circuit still depended on Cali.

Published rack and floor counts cannot convert these possibilities into an affected-user total. One rack can host a single enterprise, many hosted customers or network equipment serving thousands. A 405 kW certified load can support very different economic functions depending on density and application. Neither Wave's current site nor the Chamber profile publishes customer names, contracted capacity, occupancy or traffic.

Responsibility also changes across the incident. Wave is the immediate service provider for colocation conditions and remote hands. Zonamerica controls the common campus. A carrier controls its circuit. The customer controls application recovery. If each party declares its own component healthy, a service can remain unavailable in the gaps between them.

The original Etix project was sold as a way to reduce western Colombia's dependence on Bogotá. Cotel's 2024 account continues that theme, presenting Wave as both primary infrastructure for regional companies and a recovery site for businesses in other cities. That role makes correlated dependencies especially important. A backup site is useful only if its power, long-haul routes, operational staff and control services do not fail with the primary site.

The first public communication during a campus incident should therefore describe service state, not merely component state. “Generators operating” does not tell a tenant whether cooling reserve is stable or carriers are reachable. “Carriers available” does not tell a tenant whether both selected circuits share an entrance. “Tier IV facility” does not tell a tenant whether its contracted load lies inside the demonstrated 405 kW configuration.

Recovery is complete only when customer service is restored and stable, not when the last failed component restarts. That requires checking routes, environmental conditions, replication lag, cross-connects and application dependencies after power returns. It also requires a credible account of what happened across the Cotel, Zonamerica, utility and carrier boundaries. No reviewed public report documents such a past campus-wide exercise or incident, leaving the quality of that coordination unresolved rather than disproved.

What a serious buyer should verify next

The strongest public evidence at Zonamerica is unusually useful: a named operating facility, a current Uptime listing and a certification letter that gives a precise 405 kW scope. Due diligence should start there. The buyer should obtain the current Design and Constructed Facility certificates, the certified drawings, the change register since November 2020 and confirmation of which rooms and present loads remain within the assessed configuration.

Capacity should then be reconciled in one dated statement. The 840 kVA development plan, 900 kVA current marketing figure, 2-by-420 kVA campus figure, 2-by-450 kVA presentation and 405 kW demonstrated IT load should each be assigned to an asset, phase, unit and status. The statement should disclose installed and energized plant, current IT load, contracted load, reserve, rack density limits and the usable load after the required electrical or cooling failure.

For power, the buyer should trace both claimed utility connections from the facility switchboards to their substations and identify every common protection zone, transformer, pole line, duct bank and road crossing. It should review transfer and generator tests at representative load, battery condition, tank usable volume, fuel consumption, replenishment priority and the route a delivery takes through the campus. Campus solar generation should be counted as resilience only to the extent that an approved islanded arrangement can support the relevant load.

For cooling, the buyer should map the three claimed paths, including controls and outdoor heat rejection, then observe a stable degraded-state test. The result should state ambient conditions, maintained IT load, temperatures and reserve. Maintenance procedures should show how a condenser, air handler, control panel or shared pipe can be removed without eroding the certified state.

For connectivity, carrier names should be replaced by physical evidence. The useful package is an entrance map, conduit ownership record, meet-me-room layout, cross-connect inventory and carrier letters identifying unavoidable common points. A test should withdraw each selected circuit and its customer equipment in turn. Public observations of AS266747 can corroborate logical reachability, but they cannot replace this physical proof.

For the campus boundary, Cotel, Zonamerica and the relevant utilities and carriers should demonstrate a joint recovery sequence. It should cover an after-hours utility failure, generator operation beyond the initial fuel stock, a flooded or inaccessible approach, a carrier chamber fault and admission of external crews and spares. Roles, communications and authority to isolate shared assets should be explicit. The exercise should end at restored customer service, not at equipment start-up.

Finally, the buyer should ask what is not public: recent availability by service, significant incidents, maintenance that consumed redundancy, missed generator starts, cooling alarms, carrier cuts and the time taken to restore customer traffic. Commercial confidentiality can protect customer identities while still permitting evidence of performance.

Zonamerica and Wave do not face an unusual burden here. Every data centre converts outside dependencies into an inside promise. What makes Cali distinctive is that the promise crosses a certified 405 kW data hall, a multitenant free zone, a southern urban corridor and carrier routes marketed toward both Bogotá and the Pacific. The facility has enough public evidence to deserve confidence within its stated edge. Extending that confidence to the whole campus requires the maps, load states and recovery demonstrations that the public record does not yet provide.