Data center provider Cologix has added its first major presence on the U.S. West Coast, acquiring a data center campus in Santa Clara, Calif. from vXchnge. The deal provides Cologix with a footprint and customers in the strategic Silicon Valley market, with room for growth going forward.
The five-acre vXchnge campus has an existing data center with 9 megawatts of power capacity, and dozens of cloud, software and carrier customers. The deal also provides land to expand and the ability to add as much as 10 megawatts of additional power capacity.
“Through this acquisition, we will fulfill our strategic goal of providing total coverage of the U.S. markets with cloud gateways in Ashburn, Silicon Valley, Dallas, Minneapolis, New Jersey, Jacksonville and Columbus, OH – complementing our national coverage of Canada in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver,” said Bill Fathers, CEO of Cologix. “Silicon Valley continues to have one of the fastest growing data center markets in the world, with strong fiber connectivity to Internet backbones and a growing density of hyperscale on-ramps. This acquisition fits into Cologix’s cloud-first growth strategy by expanding our national footprint into the heart of Silicon Valley, starting with an established interconnection hub.”
This is the second time that Cologix has bought a data center from vXchnge, as it acquired a facility in Minneapolis last year. Cologix now has data centers in Dallas, Northern New Jersey, Minneapolis, Jacksonville and Lakeland, Fla. and Columbus, Ohio in the U.S. and Canadian sites in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
The Santa Clara transaction is expected to close in early Q2 2021, and will be funded through a combination of equity from Mubadala Investment Company and an increase in borrowing on Cologix’ debt facilities. Mubadala is the sovereign wealth fund for the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, and made a $500 million investment in Cologix in 2019, and is working with majority shareholder Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners to support an ambitious growth strategy for Cologix.
Cologix provides colocation services with an emphasis on connectivity hubs in regional markets, operating carrier neutral facilities and meet-me rooms. In the past several years Cologix has added a focus on the hyperscale computing market, adding capacity in cloud hubs in Montreal, Columbus and now Ashburn. The entry into Santa Clara creates additional opportunities for both hyperscale and connectivity-focused growth.
Santa Clara has long been the Data Center Capital of Silicon Valley due to competitive power pricing from the municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power. It’s the favored spot to deploy new hardware and services from the Valley’s marquee technology companies, as well as a legion of fast-moving startups. That’s why there’s about 40 data centers are located in an 18-square mile municipality.
Customers on the Santa Clara campus will get access to Cologix Access Marketplace, which provides on-demand connectivity to onramps from Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.
Data Center Frontier is edited by Rich Miller, the data center industry’s most experienced journalist. For more than 20 years, Rich has profiled the key role played by data centers in the Internet revolution.
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