Digital Realty in talks to buy Brazil data centre firm Ascenty
Fri 6 Jul 2018
Digital Realty, a leading data centre real estate investment trust, is in talks to buy Ascenty, a Brazilian data centre operator, anonymous sources have told Bloomberg.
The data centre giant, based out of San Francisco, California, is considering entering a joint venture partnership with the Brazilian firm, said people close to the matter.
Ascenty, which is majority owned by Great Hill Partners, has contracts with Facebook, Amazon and Facebook in Brazil. It was previously reported that there was interest in the company, with its owners saying that it was receiving takeover offers and that a deal at that time would have come to around $1 billion (approx. £760 million).
Neither company has currently commented on the possible deal, which is not yet in public talks. A similar arrangement was agreed between Digital Realty and Mitsubishi Corp in Japan late last year, with a focus on data centres.
Digital Realty’s investment activity
Sources have told Bloomberg that a Digital Realty deal would likely come to a much higher price. The news follows a flurry of mergers and acquisition activity in the data centre sector across the world.
AT&T recently sold a number of its data centres to Brookfield Infrastructure, while other high-profile sales have been carried out in the past year. This includes Digital Realty’s purchase of DuPont Fabros, ST Telemedia’s acquisition of Virtus in the UK, and Mapletree purchasing data centres from Carter Validus in the U.S.
Digital Realty recently opened its TOR1 facility in Toronto, on the site of the former Toronto Star printing press facility, while the original founders of the firm purchased another Canadian data centre previously belonging to Ericsson.
Ascenty operates eight data centres across Brazil and has a further six in construction. It owns 4500 kilometres of proprietary fibre across the country and opened its first data centre in 2012.
