This article is more than 1 year old

Equinix enters India by purchasing pair of Mumbai bit barns

Traffic among tenants in financial capital looks to be as tasty as renting racks

Equinix has entered the Indian market by acquiring two data centres operated by GPX.

The two data centres are in Mumbai, India’s financial capital, and offer 3,000m2 and 5,643m2 of floorspace respectively. GPX said the second bit barn has 16MW of power piped in but doesn’t rate the first.

Equinix said the pair have room for 1.350 racks between them, with capacity for another 500 after some extra building.

Both facilities have hit the Uptime Institute’s Tier IV requirements, meaning they offer resilience features capable of delivering at least 99.995 percent uptime.

The American firm said it will pay $161m for the two data centres, a sum that “represents a multiple of approximately 15x the projected EBITDA at full utilization.”

The data centre giant appears to be betting that the world wants to connect to the data centres’ existing tenants, which it labelled “the world's leading cloud service providers (CSPs), leading networks, content delivery network (CDN) providers, all local carriers, 130 internet service providers (ISPs) and four internet exchanges.”

That list is a nod to Equinix’s provision of connectivity within and between its data centres, a service that it offers as a secure and low-latency way to exchange data among partners and peers without all the hassle and risk of the public internet.

With India and its financial services sector growing quickly, swift links among big financial and internet players will be as much of a lure as well-priced racks for rent.

Equinix president and CEO Charles Meyers offered a canned quote saying: “India represents the second largest internet user base in the world, with consumption expected to grow with the continued advancement of internet infrastructure, smartphone ownership and the penetration of 4G and 5G. Extending Platform Equinix to India has long been a strategic objective for Equinix and we are excited that the GPX transaction will allow us to capitalize on this market opportunity and meet the needs of our customers as they seek to expand their digital businesses.”

The deal is expected to close in Q1 2021. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like