Digital Realty Picks Up Euro-Portfolio for $874M

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

William Stein, Digital Realty

San Francisco—Digital Realty Trust Inc. has agreed to acquire a portfolio of eight carrier-neutral data centers in Europe from Equinix for about $874 million, the company announced Monday. That price, which does not take into account fees, closing costs and prorations, reportedly represents a multiple of about 13 times the anticipated full-year 2016 EBITDA for the portfolio.

Five of the facilities are in London, two are in Amsterdam and one is in Frankfurt. Digital Realty will acquire a fee interest in one data center in Amsterdam and leasehold interests in the other data centers, with a weighted-average remaining lease term of about 23 years, including the exercise of contractual extension options. Several of the leased facilities are entitled to statutory rights that give the tenant the ability to renew on lease expiration, subject to certain exceptions.

As of press time, a Digital Realty spokesperson was unable to provide Commercial Property Executive with requested additional information.

The deal is a direct outgrowth of Equinix’s January acquisition of TelecityGroup plc for about $3.8 billion. As a condition of European Commission approval for that deal, Equinix agreed to divest the eight data centers, seven of which had been Telecity assets. (Last year saw Digital Realty’s purchase of the privately held Telx for about $1.9 billion.)

The eight facilities total about 213,000 net sellable square feet and 24.4 megawatts of IT load, serving a large base of more than 650 blue-chip clients, predominantly in network, cloud and IT services; content and digital media; and financial services. The properties are 72 percent utilized, based on available power. Entitled expansions in the London and Amsterdam facilities reportedly could add up to another 14.9 megawatts of power capacity and 88,900 net sellable square feet to support future growth.

“We have made several recent strategic investments in Europe, and this new portfolio, which is concentrated in three of the most strategically important data center and interconnection hubs in Europe, will immediately bring on board a large, diversified customer base and will also provide significant opportunities to grow and extend our footprint across the continent for years to come,” William Stein, Digital Realty CEO, said in a prepared statement.

The sale is expected to close in the third quarter, subject to European Commission approval and the satisfaction of other conditions, according to Equinix.

Finally, as part of this transaction, Digital Realty has granted Equinix an option, subject to certain conditions, to acquire the former’s facility at 114 rue Ambroise Croizat in Paris and its associated business, for about $215 million, before closing costs and prorations.