The St. Denis site currently houses Equinix’s PA2 and PA3 international business exchange (IBX) data centres. Purchasing St. Denis adds around 1,000 cabinets of sold capacity to the 5,000 cabinets Equinix has already sold in PA2 and PA3, plus expansion space for a further 1,000 cabinets in the existing buildings to support customer growth. The acquired facility is a dense interconnection site housing a core node of the Equinix internet exchange.
“As one of the largest economies in Europe, France continues to be a strong destination for local French businesses, as well as multinationals,” said Steve Smith, president and CEO of Equinix.
“We believe that by fully owning the site of our PA2 and PA3 facilities and the surrounding land, we will be able to ensure additional capacity and the ability to interconnect more networks, clouds, people and data, as customers require in the future.”
The transaction boosts Equinix’s corporate strategy of adding capacity and acquiring assets to invest behind customers and business ecosystems in key operating markets. Its seven Paris data centres are business hubs for more than 575 companies and provide significant carrier and cloud density, making them ideal sites to optimise network performance and deploy hybrid cloud architectures.
The acquisition of the new Paris site enhances Equinix’s recently expanded data centre portfolio in EMEA. In January 2016, Equinix acquired TelecityGroup, which added 34 new data centres and seven new markets to the company’s offering. Last month, Equinix completed the sale of eight European data centre assets to Digital Realty Trust for $874 million as part of its move to acquire the Telecity Group.
