Hyperscale, APAC, M&A, Europe, earnings, cloud growth
It was very busy week across the sector with a number of notable developments on the hyperscale side in APAC, M&A transactions, more activity in Europe, executive movement and the beginning of earnings season.
In APAC, another telco spun out its data centre infrastructure portfolio and this time it was Hong Kong’s PCCW agreeing to a deal with DigitalBridge. Meanwhile, Gaw Capital is backing the Data Center First platform building in Batam, Indonesia, Keppel DC REIT made its first acquisition in China and another JV was put together – this time involving Yondr Group – to tackle the burgeoning market in Mumbai, India.
On the ground, hyperscale continues to expand and Australia has emerged as a leading cloud adopter and requirements on the data centre side are climbing as a result. NEXTDC secured a new site in Sydney that will support up to 300MW, while Google is one of those clouds seeing exceptional growth and it opened a second Australian cloud region in Melbourne.
Hyperscale’s growth continues to push the envelope as we saw with earnings season kicking off and Microsoft, Google and Amazon all reporting. Google showed a meaningful uptick in its rate of growth and AWS is starting to see acceleration. The quickening pace of hyperscale growth is forcing operators to think about what data centre capacity will look like 5-10 years from now. There are a few platforms being developed with gigawatt-levels of capacity in mind and Quantum Loophole is one to watch and recently formed a JV to build a mega-campus in Frederick, Maryland.
The ecosystem around cloud continues to develop and Rackspace disclosed plans to restructure in order to double down on the public cloud opportunity. SAP continues to be one of the drivers of growth in this space and this past week, Syntax rolled out a new SAP to cloud migration program in partnership with AWS, Google disclosed a number of SAP wins on its earnings call and Virtustream put a customer’s SAP environment on its enterprise cloud. On the strategic side, Claranet purchased an asset in Germany – KHETO– that manages public cloud deployments for SAP.
There was also more activity in Europe. LCL acquired a facility in Belgium and Edge Energy has a new project targeting the Barcelona market. Spain is picking up momentum and Nabiax bought more data centres from Telefonica while CyrusOne confirmed plans to enter the Madrid market. CyrusOne also saw some unexpected changes in the C-suite that will see the founder of the company come in as the interim CEO.
Finally, there were developments of note on the SMB side. OnApp enables service provider clouds and was acquired by Virtuozzo, while GoDaddy made an investment in new technology and deepened its partnership with Google as it continues to expand the breadth of its capabilities.
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