APAC, Europe, hyperscale, M&A, Nordics, MSP, managed third party cloud
The past week saw a number of developments on the hyperscale data centre side coming out of Europe and APAC.
In APAC, there continues to be joint venture formation as operators and investors team up to tackle the very unique and capital-intensive requirements of building hyperscale data centres. Digital Realty is no stranger to the JV model and combined with existing partner Brookfield Infrastructure to build data centres in India. Meanwhile, Colt DCS and backer Fidelity teamed up with Mitsui to develop more hyperscale facilities in Japan, and Iron Mountain’s JV partner Web Werks is set to develop a new project in Bangalore.
Operators in APAC continue to pursue new market opportunities as hyperscale growth accelerates. GDS has been focused on China and will now enter the Malaysian market with a multi-MW project ready to kick off in Johor.
In Europe, there was another transaction in the Nordics. Norway’s Green Mountain was acquired by real estate firm Azrieli Group and this follows the recent IPI Partners acquisition of DigiPlex. We also had a chance to speak with Vantage Data Centers about its European initiatives, while DE-CIX shared some interesting data points about its growth amid the pandemic.
Cloud on-ramps continue to pop up en masse and Google Cloud was active in the recent week. NEXTDC lit up two interconnection nodes for Google Cloud in Melbourne, Australia and CoreSite added the partner interconnection option to its campus in Chicago. In other developments related to Google Cloud, Bell Canada partnered up with Google for cloud and edge computing infrastructure and a new Google Cloud region was launched in India.
There was M&A activity in other pockets of the sector. On the MSP side, Claranet acquired another provider in Portugal, Netrix acquired the managed services business of Contegix, while Apps Associates switched out PE owners. In the SMB world, HostPapa moved into technology acquisition.
Finally, there was some notable product development in the cloud arena. AWS recently released Proton for microservices management and the Lightsail VPS hosting product now has a snapshot capability for migrating from Lightsail to EC2.
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