Led by the UAE's Mubadala Investment Company, the round included funds from Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, RDIF, and VC and realty manager, SberInvest.
The significant funding boost will be used to expand the Moscow North and South campuses, as part of the firm's strategy to run one of the largest data campuses in Europe. Specifically it wants to offer "exceptional capacity to an even broader customer base".
“As one of the largest carrier-neutral commercial data centre operators in Russia, IXcellerate is enabling digitalisation in Russia through unrivalled scalability and growth opportunities," said CEO Andrei Aksenov.
"With the help of this new funding, we aim to provide the type of facilities and services to our existing and future customers that are both ultra-powerful and sustainable in the long-term, while ensuring that our clients continue to benefit from our reliable engineering infrastructure, ESG compliant practices and outstanding service levels,” he added.
Askinov was appointed last year with a specific focus on growing the business in the Russian market.
Last year, RDIF acquired Linxdatacenter alongside JSC ER-Telecom Holding and Middle East investment fund Talos Fund I LP. Headquartered in the Netherlands, it uses facilities in Moscow and St Petersburg to link international businesses with cloud services and networks across Eastern and Western Europe.
RDIF's SVP, Mikhail Kireev, said the latest investment will " further enhance our portfolio of collocation and data centers".
Kireev added: "IXcellerate will add new facilities and increase the customer base allowing more companies to expand the scale of operations as the need for high-end affordable data storage services will keep on growing rapidly. We expect IXcellerate to further strengthen its market position and boost its leadership in the Russian commercial data centres segment."
Mubadala is also going big on its ICT investments. In the last two years the Emirati state-owned holding company has backed CityFibre, Jio, and Group 42, among others, and its Technology Holding Company acquired a share of Khazna Data Centre from du.
"Leading this investment round into IXcellerate aligns with Mubadala’s strategy to invest in the digital economy and the sectors that support it,” said Abdulla Naser Almarzooqi, deputy head of Russia and CIS Investment Program at Mubadala.
The Russia-based SberInvest is sub-brand of Sberbank brand, the largest bank in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe.
Andrey Shemetov, Sberbank SVP and head of SberCIB said: “We live in the age of big data, which is stored somewhere far away in the cloud. The data seems ‘weightless’, but data centres with their servers are in fact huge and city-like facilities. I have seen them in real life and they grip imagination. What IXcellerate delivers for businesses is of crucial importance. Construction of such data towns ensures uninterrupted operations of companies along with on-demand computing power, helping them not to bother where to locate IT infrastructure."
