With $800M in hand, Vantage Data Centers buys Etix and moves into Europe

Vantage Data Centers is making a move into Europe by buying Etix Everywhere, and building five new greenfield hyperscale data center campuses.

In order to fund its European ambitions, Vantage Data Centers, which provides data center capacity to enterprises and hyperscale cloud providers, also announced on Monday that it has secured more than $800 million in new equity funding from its current investors and new investor Digital Colony Partners. The latest funding followed up on last year's $692 million in capital that Vantage raised to accelerate its expansion in North America.

For its European expansion, Vantage said Monday that it plans to invest a total of $2 billion.

Etix's data center portfolio includes a 55 megawatt hyperscale data center in Frankfurt, Germany, which is currently under construction. Separate from Etix, Vantage has also bought land and planning to build hyperscale data center campuses in Berlin, Milan, Warsaw and Zurich.

Founded in 2012, Etix operates 12 data centers for more than 200 customers, who are mainly in Europe. Etix also has a data centers in Latin America and Africa. Financial details of Etix deal weren't disclosed.

Former Etix CEO Antoine Boniface has joined Vantage's executive team as its president in Europe. Josh Buis, who joined Vantage last year as vice president for international business development, will also serve as senior vice president, sales and business development for Europe.

“As data center demand from our customer base continues to rapidly increase worldwide, Vantage is embarking upon its largest expansion ever into Europe through the development of five strategic markets.” said Sureel Choksi, president and CEO of Vantage, in a statement. “The acquisition of Etix accelerates our expansion to Frankfurt, Europe’s highest growth hyperscale market. We are very excited to welcome Antoine and his team to lead our European business.”

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google, and Alibaba Cloud have also been increasing their respective global presence with the aggressive build out of new hyperscale data center campuses.

RELATED: Hyperscale data center count passes the 500 milestone in 3Q - report

According to Synergy Research Group (SRG), the number of hyperscale data centers hit a new high-water mark in last year's third quarter. The number of hyperscale data centers increased to 504 at the end of Q3, which tripled the total from the beginning of 2013. The total number of data centers increased by 55 over the last four quarters, which marked a bigger increase than was seen in the previous four quarters, according to SRG.

On a regional basis, the U.S. still accounts for close to 40% of the major cloud and internet data center sites, according to SRG, but the EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions continue to have the highest growth rates. The U.S. still has a commanding lead in regards to the number hyperscale data center locations, followed by China, Japan, the UK, Germany and Australia. Combined, those six countries account for 70% of the worldwide total.