M&A, MSP, managed public cloud, investments, expansions, AI
The sector got the new year off to a busy start, with notable M&A activity, significant levels of investment driven by expansion requirements and liquid cooling developments.
The recent slowdown in M&A activity has seen strategic acquirers from the SI and consulting world become less active. The likes of Cognizant, Deloitte, Atos and Accenture have been active buyers of managed infrastructure and managed public cloud providers, but the past year did not see too many deals. That could be set to change and just this past week Accenture acquired Navisite. Other M&A developments came out of the European telco space. Penta Infra acquired a KPN data centre to enter the Amsterdam market, while the infrastructure operating assets of France’s Iliad has already spun out and is now looking to add external investors. Growth and expansion requirements continue to drive strategic activity, especially in the hyperscale arena. DigitalBridge and Silver Lake are investing $6.4b in Vantage Data Centers, while EQT Infrastructure is putting more behind EdgeConneX. Both are expanding aggressively on the back of hyperscale demand in a number of regions around the world.
The growing demand coming from the AI space continues to impact operators as they prepare for a shifting demand profile that will see higher densities with the need for different cooling technologies. Equinix, for example, has been busy building out support for direct liquid-to-chip cooling across its footprint.
Other developments of note included Yotta in India doubling its GPU chip order, Google Cloud removing egress fees and Vantage Data Centers entering the Taiwan market.
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