India, APAC, M&A, Hypescale, edge, earnings
It was another busy week across the sector with a number of strategic developments, expansion activity and new market entry.
India has been at the centre of recent expansion activity in APAC. Princeton Digital Group, based in Singapore, became the latest to enter the Mumbai market in India. It will build a 48MW campus in the Navi Mumbai area, an emerging data centre and hyperscale cluster. The move comes on the heels of Iron Mountain and EdgeConneX entering India through joint ventures.
There were also a number of strategic moves in recent weeks. On the MSP side, Atmosera acquired a Microsoft-oriented development shop called Wintellect and InMotion Hosting picked up VPS provider RamNode. The data centre side was particularly busy in a number of US markets, with Landmark Dividend acquiring a trio of facilities, Element Critical buying a Skybox data centre in Houston and VPLS adding a presence in New York. On the SMB side, Wix made another technology-focused acquisition. Finally, not officially referenced as an acquisition, but Digital Realty picked up the technology and development resources of SDN provider Pureport.
There were some other interesting deals that we will discuss in the coming weeks. Edge provider Dartpoints acquired Immedion and CapitaLand in Singapore acquired a portfolio of data centres based in the UK and Europe from Digital Realty.
The recent power outages in Dallas did not take down third party data centres. The response was swift and effective. But data centres are still vulnerable to accidents and operational negligence. It is not clear yet what the cause was, but OVH in France had one of its data centres in Strasbourg largely destroyed by a fire. Customers have been left offline and others have permanently lost their infrastructure. To reiterate, we still do not know what caused the accident (and are glad to hear that nobody was hurt). But the incident raises questions around whether it is wise for providers to take on data centre construction and operations in addition to competing in the highly competitive cloud and hosting market. The value proposition of these skill sets are distinct and it is increasingly difficult to handle both effectively.
Hyperscale continues to grow and the data centre infrastructure required to support it is as well. Equinix released details about its several xScale builds across Europe and APAC. Meanwhile, APAC continues to see activity. AWS is building out Osaka into a full region with three AZs, while new Hong Kong-based provider Turbidite confirmed plans for a new edge data centre in Guam. Latin America has seen accelerating momentum and Ascenty disclosed plans for Brazil and other markets in Latin America.
The list of publicly listed comps in the sector continues to grow as we get closer to adding Cyxtera, Digital Ocean and Intermedia. We take a closer look at some of the latest results from GDS, Fastly, Cloudflare, Akamai, GoDaddy and Zoom. And on the private side, we got some feedback from Swiss SMB provider Hostpoint.
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