Data-center law in Colombia

National jurisdiction · as of 2026-09-05

Colombia has no data-center-specific siting, permitting, or utility statute; a data center is sited and incentivized through the general free-trade-zone (zona franca) regime of Ley 1004 de 2005, regulated by Decreto 2147 de 2016, which grants a qualifying industrial or services user special tax, customs, and foreign-trade treatment without naming information technology or data infrastructure as a distinct priority sector.

Decreto 278 de 2021 relaxed the regime's minimum-area requirement for a free trade zone dedicated exclusively to providing services, of the kind a data center would typically register as, when it is sited in a municipality or district with fewer than one million inhabitants.

No provision addresses electricity grid interconnection, water use, or air emissions specifically; those fall to Colombia's general energy, water and environmental licensing regimes rather than to the zona franca decree itself, which are not described here.

Instruments on record

1 instrument on record, grouped by the family of approval each one governs.

Public agreements

What fiscal agreements attach a data center to its host jurisdiction?

Free Trade Zone Regime, Tax, Customs and Land Use Incentives

In force

Decreto 2147 de 2016 (Regimen de Zonas Francas)

Effective 2017-01-08 · Applies to both

Decreto 2147 de 2016 implements Ley 1004 de 2005's free-trade-zone regime, defining a zona franca permanente as a delimited area where multiple industrial or commercial users install and receive special tax, customs, and foreign-trade treatment, and recognizing an industrial user of services (usuario industrial de servicios) among the classes of qualifying user, the category a data-center operator would typically register under.

Article 28 conditions a permanent free trade zone's declaration on a minimum area, including at least 150 square meters of office space for control entities and 1,500 square meters for customs inspection, but paragraph 1, as rewritten by article 12 of Decreto 278 de 2021, waives that minimum-area requirement for a free trade zone dedicated exclusively to providing services when it is sited in a municipality or district of fewer than one million inhabitants, provided the reduced area still fits the project's needs and is justified in its technical feasibility study.

The decree's Título I general provisions, including the classification of free-trade-zone types and users, took effect once fifteen calendar days had elapsed after the decree's 23 December 2016 publication in the Official Gazette; other titles, including the specific declaration procedure containing article 28's area rule, commenced on a later date tied to a DIAN customs information-system rollout that the sources read do not further specify.

Source: Full text of law