Vantage Data Centers will invest CAD$900 million ($712 million US) to rapidly scale its Canadian operations, including the development of a third campus in Montreal and the expansion of two existing campuses in Montreal and Quebec City.
“Our continued investment and expansion in the Province of Quebec cements Vantage Data Centers as the largest hyperscale digital infrastructure provider in Canada,” said Maxime Guévin, vice president and general manager of Vantage’s Canadian business. “The Quebec Province is an ideal location for data centers due to our green and affordable power options, rich connectivity, cool climate and business-friendly culture. We look forward to welcoming our global customers to our new facilities later this year.”
Vantage will now have four campuses in the Province of Quebec. The wholesale data center specialist is expanding its QC4 Montreal campus with a third data center totaling 21 megawatts (MWs) and 94,000 square feet, which is expected to open in the fourth quarter of 2022. Once fully developed, the campus will offer customers 48 MWs of IT capacity and be powered by nearly 100% renewable energy from Hydro-Québec.
In addition, Vantage has begun construction of a third Montreal data center campus (QC6), which will also be powered with nearly 100% renewable energy. In Quebec City, Vantage has acquired an additional eight acres of land to expand the growing QC2 campus.
Montreal’s Role in a Greener Cloud
The Montreal data center market‘s sustainable energy profile has made it a magnet for hyperscale operators. Hydro Quebec has invested heavily in building hydro-electric dams and generation, which supply 95 percent of the province’s power, with wind and other renewables providing the remaining 5 percent. Large cloud computing providers love cheap green power, and several have made Montreal the focal point for their infrastructure expansion in Canada. Both Google and Amazon Web Services have opened cloud regions in Montreal in recent years.
The expansion of the QC2 campus is being partially funded by Société Générale, one of Europe’s leading financial services groups offering sustainability-linked financing options. A portion of the campus was approved for a “green loan,” a first for Vantage, by meeting specific requirements, including the use of nearly 100% renewable energy, the low amount of anticipated carbon emissions, water conservation, an industry-leading design Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and an energy management plan to ensure high operational performance.
“As companies seek to limit their carbon footprint, Greater Montréal is very well positioned to support them,” said Stéphane Paquet, President and CEO, Montréal International. “The digital world we live in generates more and more data that needs to be stored. This reinvestment by Vantage proves once again that renewable energy in Québec makes it possible to address this increase responsibly.”
Vantage Keeps Building
Rapid global growth has been the theme for Vantage since 2017, when the company was acquired by DigitalBridge, which was seeking a platform to target the wholesale data center market to complement DataBank, its portfolio company for colocation and edge computing.
Since becoming part of DigitalBridge, Vantage has been boosted by billions of dollars in investment, enabling it to both build and buy data centers.
- In 2017, Vantage launched a $1 billion expansion into Northern Virginia, the world’s largest cloud computing market, with a campus in Ashburn.
- In 2018, acquired 4Degrees Colocation and two data centers in the growing cloud hub in Quebec, Canada.
- In 2019, the company announced plans for a 1 million square foot campus in Goodyear, Arizona to enter the Phoenix market. That campus is currently under construction.
- In early 2020, Vantage entered the European market with $2 billion in acquisitions, buying Etix Everywhere and its Frankfurt campus along with land parcels in Berlin, Milan, Zurich and Warsaw.
- In April 2020 it extended its European expansion, buying Next Generation Data and its massive facility in Cardiff, Wales.
- Last November Vantage acquired Hypertec, adding three data centers to expand its footprint in Montreal.
- In September Vantage expanded into the Asia-Pacific market, acquiring assets from Agile Data Centers and PCCW. The deal included $1.5 billion in fresh equity investment from Vantage’s financial backers.
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.
This announcement is a major validation for Quebec as one of the new top market for digital infrastructures in North America. At QScale we also chose this location for our first 142MW campus as the market demands for clean, affordable and sustainable electricity is very high.