Equinix Acquires Digital Realty’s Operating Business in Paris

By Robert Demeter

Equinix Paris Data Center

Paris, France—Equinix Inc. has announced that it has completed the purchase of Digital Realty‘s operating business in St. Denis, Paris, including its real estate and data center facility, for approximately $211 million. Equinix recently sold eight carrier-neutral data centers in Europe in a transaction valued at about $874 million to Digital Realty Trust Inc. Digital Realty gave Equinix the option to acquire it’s facility in Paris and Equinix has elected to do so.

The site currently houses Equinix’s PA2 and PA3 International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers and the transaction furthers Equinix’s corporate strategy of acquiring assets to invest behind customers and business ecosystems in key operating markets. The acquired facility is a dense interconnection site housing a core node of the Equinix Internet Exchange, one of the leading traffic exchanges in France.

Equinix’s seven Paris data centers are business hubs for more than 575 companies. The data centers provide significant carrier and cloud density, making them ideal sites to optimize network performance and deploy hybrid cloud architectures. Equinix’s global interconnection platform provides access to over 160 network service providers and more than 100 cloud service providers in Paris for maximum connectivity to leading business services including Google Cloud Platform and IBM SoftLayer via Equinix Cloud Exchange.

The acquisition of the new Paris site enhances Equinix’s recently expanded data center portfolio in EMEA. In January 2016 Equinix acquired TelecityGroup plc, which added 34 new data centers and seven new markets to the company’s offering in the region including Dublin, Helsinki, Istanbul, Manchester, Sofia, Stockholm and Warsaw. Equinix now operates 146 IBX data centers in 40 markets, providing customers even more ways to connect with other businesses around the world on Platform Equinix.

“As one of the largest economies in Europe, France continues to be a strong destination for local French businesses, as well as multinationals. We believe that by fully owning the site of our PA2 and PA3 facilities and the surrounding land, we will be able to ensure additional capacity and the ability to interconnect more networks, clouds, people and data, as customers require in the future,” said Steve Smith, president and CEO, Equinix.

Image courtesy of Equinix