Data centre expansion, Europe, M&A, hyperscale nodes
It was another busy week as data centre and hyperscale expansion saw the most noteworthy developments and all of it happened on a global basis.
Data centre expansions remain in full swing and they are taking place in primary markets where hyperscale is headed. That is starting to shift to edge markets and we had a chance to go over Equinix’s expansion plans in the EMEA region, which includes some of these locations. Also in Europe, CyrusOne is building in Frankfurt and Green Datacentre is building a new facility in Switzerland. Other developments in UK/Europe saw Interxion win a deal in London and Liquid Web added more services to its infrastructure node in Amsterdam, while MSP NetActuate added more capacity in the same market.
Meanwhile, there was build activity in the US and Canada with the likes of Stream, Compass and TierPoint all active. Arizona is the focus of a number of these providers and word is Google is planning to build in this market as well.
Compass Datacenters has been particularly busy the past few weeks. It partnered up to help TierPoint with its expansion and added capital resources and a new investor. Following the investment, Compass went out and acquired ROOT Data Center in Montreal, another provider focused on hyperscale customers.
Speaking of hyperscale, Oracle Cloud is close to opening a second location in Canada and brought online a data centre in South Korea. Microsoft is one of the biggest consumers of third party data centres as Azure and other properties like LinkedIn continue to grow aggressively. Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is going all-in on Azure, likely making Microsoft an even bigger third party data centre consumer.
AWS is of course the barometer for all things hyperscale. It helped kick off earnings season with more aggressive growth numbers, though the trajectory has shifted a bit the last few quarters. We have a summary and details will be coming next week.
Finally, an interesting development to follow came out of the Amsterdam market – one of the global centres for hyperscale growth and corresponding data centre expansions. Regulatory bodies in Amsterdam are looking at putting at least some kind of restrictions on where and how many data centres are built as the scale of these facilities is putting pressure on society and other sectors of the economy. There are rumblings of this kind of regulatory activity coming out of markets in APAC as well. This will merit close monitoring.
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