DIGITAL REALTY BUYS LAND IN PARIS

Digital Realty has just purchased a 3.5 acre (152,460 square feet) land parcel in Ferriers-en-Brie, Paris, for €6.1 million ($6.9m).

The company is coming back to Paris to build a 12MW data center, after selling its sole St Denis, Paris data center in 2016, to the colocation giant Equinix for €190 million ($212m).

“Given local supply constraints and rapidly growing enterprise colocation and hyper-scale customer demand, Paris is an attractive connectivity hub poised for significant growth, and we are delighted to re-establish a strong foothold in this key global metro,” said A. William Stein, Digital Realty CEO.

According to the company, environmental and operational building permits are currently in place, and Digital Realty has said that it will begin construction on the data center in the fourth quarter of 2019.

“This is an important milestone in our continued global expansion as the pre-eminent data center solutions provider,” said Andy Power, Digital Realty Chief Financial Officer. “Paris is a leading technology and interconnection hub for the European region, and a key market for our global footprint.”

Before acquiring the St Denis, Paris data center in 2016, Equinix had bought Telecity in 2015. The acquisition then gave Equinix a very strong position that the EU required it to sell eight facilities – in London, Amsterdam and Paris. Interestingly, all the properties Equinix sold off went to Digital Realty.

The company currently operates 22 data centers across Europe, located in Amsterdam, Dublin, London, Geneva, Frankfurt and Manchester.

Last month, the joint venture MC Digital Realty officially opened its second datacenter KIX11 on its Osaka campus, Japan. KIX11 is a four-story facility that spans over 23,000 square meters of floor area, reinforced with seismic isolation systems and developed to deliver up to 28MW of total IT capacity.