Digital Realty Closes $874M Purchase of European Portfolio

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

Digital Realty Trust data center

San Francisco—Digital Realty Trust Inc. has completed its acquisition, first disclosed in May, of eight carrier-neutral data centers in Europe in a transaction valued at about $874 million, the REIT announced Tuesday. The purchase price reportedly is about 13 times the anticipated full-year 2016 portfolio EBITDA.

The portfolio comprises five properties in London, two in Amsterdam and one in Frankfurt and totals about 213,000 net sellable square feet and 24.4 megawatts of IT load. It serves a base of more than 650 clients, predominantly in the network, cloud and IT services; content and digital media; and financial services sectors.

The portfolio reportedly also provides substantial available capacity, with about 6.9 megawatts of fully installed power and 62,700 net sellable square feet immediately available for lease. Entitled expansions at the London and Amsterdam facilities could add up to another 14.9 megawatts of power capacity and 88,900 net sellable square feet to support future growth.

The seller was Equinix, which had agreed to the divestment as a condition of the European Commission’s approval for Equinix’s acquisition, this past January, of TelecityGroup plc for about $3.8 billion. Telecity had owned seven of the eight properties in this portfolio.

Digital Realty also gave Equinix an option to acquire a facility in Paris; Equinix has elected to exercise that option and will purchase the property from Digital Realty for about $211 million. That sale is expected to close in the third quarter.

“Digital Realty’s global platform is one of our key competitive advantages and this transaction significantly extends our footprint in the three most strategically important interconnection markets in Europe,” Digital Realty CEO William Stein said in a prepared statement. “We believe that Europe will remain a growing, high-demand region for data center solutions. This portfolio acquisition will further enable us to support the growth of our global customer base, nearly two-thirds of whom deploy data center requirements in multiple metropolitan areas across our portfolio.”

“Global data center demand continues to be robust due in part to the proliferation of cloud computing,” Lukas Hartwich, a senior analyst at Green Street Advisors, told Commercial Property Executive. “Digital’s recent acquisition highlights the fact that data center REITs are trying to capitalize on this demand through acquisitions that expand the scope and capacity of their portfolios.”

Image courtesy of the Digital Realty Data Centers & Colocation Facebook page