M&A, MEA, hyperscale, Dublin, regulatory environment, land banking
The past week saw some notable M&A activity, more regulatory movement in Europe, developments in global markets and the impact of climate change continues to have an impact on infrastructure operations.
There was more M&A activity in global markets. Israel is a rapidly developing market that EdgeConneX entered through M&A last year and there was another transaction in this market as Berkshire, an investor in South Africa’s Teraco, took a stake in local operator MedOne. On the SMB side, team.blue has been active in recent weeks and another consolidator, Thrive, closed another deal that was vertically oriented. Still with MSPs, 11:11 Systems made another deal, acquiring managed network provider Static1. There were also some wireless tower portfolio deals.
Last week we tracked more developments coming out of Dublin’s shifting regulatory environment. In the Netherlands, there are also moratoriums in place for certain hyperscale data centres and another municipality is getting involved. Environmental impact remains a primary driver of increased regulatory activity and it is starting to show in other ways. The recent heat waves in Europe negatively impacted data centres housing public cloud infrastructure platforms and resulted in some performance issues. Worst case scenarios were avoided, but this is a threat that is not going away.
Finally, there was more expansion activity in markets around the world. In Virginia, Quantum Loophole started to build out its fibre network, QTS acquired land in the US and Europe and Lumen confirmed plans to extend its edge footprint buildout to Europe. Meanwhile, in APAC, GDS started on its project in Batam, Indonesia.
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