M&A, telcos, infrastructure funds, legacy assets, divestments, regulatory issues, expansions
The past week was highlighted by a significant amount of M&A activity and more developments around markets facing regulatory issues. Meanwhile, a number of expansion projects were completed and brought online.
There was activity across the spectrum in M&A. The telco divestment wave has shifted from North America and Europe to APAC, but there have been stops and starts in the region. Malaysia’s TIME Dotcom is the latest said to be evaluating a possible divestment and a number of buyers are interested. But will TIME ultimately sell or will it look to stay in the game and partner, which has been an increasingly common path in a region with so much upside potential.
It has not been a secret that long-term investors maintain strong interest in the data centre sector. Stonepeak is an investor that has made a number of long-term bets and its latest is with the data centre arm of American Tower, which took over the CoreSite business.
There also continues to be divestments of non-strategic and legacy assets. Alpha3 Cloud acquired the US-based assets of European subscale cloud provider CloudSigma and Redcentric completed its acquisition of the Sungard assets in the UK. The deal scales up the Redcentric business further, which also acquired a smallish UK-based operator 4D Data Centres.
On the hosting and cloud side, there was another acquisition of a managed public cloud shop. Node4 in the UK acquired risual, while elsewhere in Europe, team.blue acquired a WordPress hosting platform.
The regulatory environment continues to shift in markets like Dublin. New rules have forced EirGrid to shut down around 30 applications and this is expected to have a significant impact on the current pipeline of data centre developments, with many of them being hyperscalers. We have some of the details.
Finally, there were a number of builds that reached the finish line and came online. AirTrunk completed its final phase at SYD1, DataBank finished an expansion in Atlanta and Ascenty opened a new data centre in Mexico with pre-let capacity.
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