Announcing its business milestones last week, the hyperscale operator attributed the gains to its European market debut and expansions throughout North America.
“In 2020 we set an aggressive goal to expand Vantage well beyond its North American roots to become one of the fastest growing, leading data centre providers globally,” said Sureel Choksi (pictured), president and CEO of Vantage Data Centers.
“With access to scalable capital, the support of our investors and a growing team, we were able to achieve this goal in order to support increased demand from hyperscalers, cloud providers and large enterprise customers globally.”
The growth means the Vantage portfolio now covers seven countries over two continents, with the total number of markets increasing from six to 12 last year, and campuses growing from seven to 14. Total IT capacity increased by more than 100MW.
Vantage said that once fully developed, its current and planned campuses will enable it to provide customers with more than 1GW of operational capacity across more than 650,000 square metres.
Funding
Over the past 12 months, Vantage raised US$3.6 billion through what it described as "innovative funding strategies to meet market demand and provide customers with state-of-the-art facilities".
In July, Vantage formed a strategic partnership valued at $3.5 billion with an investor group led by Colony Capital, Inc. in North America. To keep pace with its growth, Vantage also strengthened its senior leadership team with the addition of multiple executives in business and operations positions globally.
Following its European market debut in Q1 of last year, Vantage acquired Etix Everywhere and greenfield developments in Frankfurt, Berlin, Milan, Warsaw and Zurich. This was followed by the Q3 acquisition of UK-based Next Generation Data, Europe’s largest single data centre campus. This marked another first: Vantage’s first greenfield European data centre. It is scheduled to be delivered in the third quarter of this year.
In North America, focus fell on the world's two largest data centre markets, Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley, in line with customer demand for premiere hyperscale capacity. In Canada, Vantage acquired Hypertec’s Montreal-based hyperscale data centre business in Q4 – the third acquisition of the year and one which allowed Vantage to expand its total footprint in the Province of Quebec to 81MW of IT capacity across three campuses.
“We are excited to see Vantage’s transformation to a scaled global hyperscale data center operator,” said Marc Ganzi, CEO of Colony Capital and Digital Colony. “Congrats to Sureel and his best-in-class team on a banner year. We couldn’t be more pleased to support their strategic M&A, business development and financing needs in 2020 and beyond.”
