M&A, data centre, CDN, hyperscale, global expansion, Europe
It was a busy week as the sector did not skip a beat coming out of public holidays in the UK, US and Canada.
The week was highlighted by another major data centre transaction as Blackstone agreed to acquire QTS in a multi-billion dollar deal. The move speaks to both the appetite for putting capital to work in the sector and the need for a more long-term and patient approach to a game that is increasingly driven by the unique nature of building for and pursuing hyperscale.
There were a few other deals of note. 1547 and Valterra Partners acquired ColoHouse, based in Miami, and Accenture made another cloud consultancy acquisition in the ANZ region.
Earnings season has wound down and we take a closer look at the results comings from QTS and Cyxtera on the data centre side, along with CDNs Cloudflare and Fastly, in addition to Zoom. Fastly is growing but hit a snag last week with an outage that brought down a number of major web properties.
Hyperscale cloud continues to expand on a global basis and there were a number of notable developments. In Spain, AWS confirmed it was ahead of schedule, while revealing plans to expand in the UAE. Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud is building a cloud region in The Philippines and Tencent Cloud is adding APAC-based AZs in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Tokyo. Tencent recently brought online a region in Jakarta, and is building outside APAC in Bahrain, while adding additional AZs in Frankfurt. Finally, Oracle Cloud recently launched a second region in Brazil where it will enable interoperability with Microsoft Azure.
Europe is driving demand for colocation and a number of operators expanded in recent weeks. Interxion broke ground in Marseille, Iron Mountain is building in London, Nabiax is expanding in Spain and Green Mountain added capacity for a hyperscale tenant in Norway. In the US, we saw Switch disclose plans for a fifth campus location in Texas, while Yondr acquired land in Northern Virginia and Equinix expanded further in Silicon Valley.
Things continue to normalize in select regions and US-based operators are reporting growth and activity in their sales pipelines as economies open up and move gradually towards pre-pandemic levels.
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