Japan's NTT Group is buying a majority stake in Germany's biggest provider of datacentre services, the latest sign of convergence in a competitive European market.
NTT will pay more than $US840 million in cash for control of Germany's e-shelter, which manages nearly 90,000 square meters of datacentre space in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the companies announced.
Companies like e-shelter provide power and cooling services in high-tech warehouses where other companies can set up compute gear. It saves them the cost of building and managing their own data centers.
The market for such collocation services is growing about 10 per cent a year in Europe, helped by trends in Big Data, Cloud services, outsourcing and video/social networking, Synergy Research Group said last month.
The acquisition will make NTT the third-largest datacentre operator in Europe, it said, behind US-based Equinix and the UK's TelecityGroup, which announced last month it was buying Dutch rival Interxion in a multi-billion dollar deal.
It's NTT's fifth datacentre acquisition in three years, and was done through its NTT Communications business.
James Niccolai covers data centers and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow James on Twitter at @jniccolai. James's e-mail address is [email protected]
