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NEWS IN BRIEF
The biggest data center news stories of the last three months
Partners Group buys Iceland’s atNorth atNorth has two facilities in Iceland totaling 83MW, and is building an 11MW site in Stockholm, Sweden. Partners Group says atNorth is its fourth digital infrastructure investment in 2021.
TikTok’s €420m Irish data center delayed due to Covid-19 Construction shutdowns have pushed the Chinese social media’s facility opening from early 2022 to late in the year.
Chip shortages cause server delays at Final Fantasy XIV data centers Players are struggling to access the video game Final Fantasy XIV due to publisher Square Enix being unable to acquire servers fast enough due to semiconductor shortages.
KKR & GIP acquire CyrusOne for $15bn, American Tower acquires CoreSite for $10.1bn CyrusOne and CoreSite are both to be taken over in multi-billion dollar acquisitions. CyrusOne will be taken private in an acquisition by KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners, while CoreSite has been taken over by American Tower, a publicly-listed Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) traditionally focused on cell tower infrastructure. The two data center REITs were both rumored to be potentially exploring sales. The deals mean three such publicly-listed data center firms have been acquired this year. CyrusOne, which operates around 50 data centers globally, was acquired for $15bn. “We have built one of the world’s leading data center companies with a presence across key US and international markets supporting our customers’ mission-critical digital infrastructure requirements while creating significant value for our stockholders,” said Dave Ferdman, co-founder and interim president and CEO of CyrusOne. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022. Upon completion of the transaction, CyrusOne will be a privately held company wholly owned by KKR and GIP. KKR’s investment is being made primarily from its global infrastructure and real estate equity strategies, and GIP’s
investment is being made from its global infrastructure funds. On the same day as the acquisition was announced, American Tower bought CoreSite for $10.1 billion. CoreSite operates around 25 data centers across the US. American Tower said the deal will be “transformative” for its mobile edge compute business, allowing it to establish a “converged communications and computing infrastructure offering with distributed points of presence across multiple Edge layers.” Tom Bartlett, American Tower CEO, said: “We are in the early stages of a cloudbased, connected and globally distributed digital transformation that will evolve over the next decade and beyond. We expect the combination of our leading global distributed real estate portfolio and CoreSite’s high quality, interconnectionfocused data center business to help position American Tower to lead in the 5G world.” Another publicly-listed REIT, QTS, was acquired by Blackstone this year for $10bn, while Cyxtera recently became the latest publicly-listed data center firm after completing a SPAC merger with Starboard Value Acquisition Corp. bit.ly/MegaDataCenterDeals
6 DCD Magazine • datacenterdynamics.com
China says local govs should stop “blind and disorderly development” of data centers to hit green targets Local governments have been told “in principle” not to provide incentives to data center companies to build facilities in areas that aren’t classified as national hubs by the government.
US FTC sues to stop Nvidia’s Arm acquisition, says it would harm data center chip innovation The US agency said that the deal would give Nvidia too much control over the technology and designs of rival firms, and give it the means and incentive to stifle innovation. The vote to issue the administrative complaint was 4-0.
Korea Gas and KT announce data center at LNG terminal The two companies will develop a data center that would use the cold energy from regasification at the LNG import plant near Seoul, Korea. The combination would save energy at the data center and use waste cold energy. The use of LNG cold energy could save around 12MW of power at a data center such as the one KT runs in Yongsan.
