Digital Bridge ‘Plots’ £800m Vantage Data Centre Acquisition

Digital Bridge has reportedly agreed to purchase Vantage Data Centers from buyout firm Silver Lake Partners for over $1 billion (£800m), according to Reuters, citing sources, who claim the deal will be confirmed in the coming weeks.

Digital Bridge specialises in data centres, cloud storage and fibre communications and the acquisition would add Vantage’s two campuses and five data centres to its portfolio, totalling 51 MW of IT load in Santa Clara, California and 9 MW in Quincy, Washington.

Digital Bridge and Silver Lake have both been contacted for comment but this deal would add to the high level of movement and consolidation currently taking place in the data centre market, as businesses struggle to keep pace with rising data storage demands.

A moving market

Verizon, for example, was last year reported to be auctioning off its US data centre assets and HPE recently acquired Massachusetts-based data centre ‘unicorn’ SimpliVity in a $650 million (£527m) cash deal.

American telecoms giant CenturyLink has also been busy in the space, selling its global network of data centres for $2.15 billion (£1.7bn) in order to fund the acquisition of rival provider Level 3 Communications.

However, several companies are also expanding their portfolios. Amazon Web Services (AWS) finished 2016 by announcing the opening of new data centres in Canada and London to grow its cloud reach and Facebook recently announced plans to build its third data centre outside the US in Denmark.

Focusing on the UK, Oracle has picked London as one of three new infrastructure Regions to be created over the next six months, following on from recent UK expansions by Microsoft and IBM.

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