Earlier this year, Equinix announced the acquisition of 13 Bell data centers in Canada. From Saint-John to Vancouver, Equinix now covers all canadian data center markets. Today, Equinix is announcing that the transaction was completed for US$780M.
In Montreal, the only data center that was sold is the former Hypertec data center at 6205 Vanden Abeele (often referred as 9300 trans-canada hwy).
This data center is now on the official Equinix map and adds itself to the 200+ data centers of the company.
What does this mean for Montreal?
A lot… and nothing at the same time….
On one side, the 9300TC data center is nothing special. It was built a long time ago by Hypertec, which has now improved its data center design at 2800TC. That said, 9300TC does have a certified Tier 3 pod. To most colo clients that paper doesn’t mean much, but for some old school businesses like banks and insurance companies, that does help.
9300TC does have a fair amount of fiber and networks, and Equinix is planning to add its Cloud Exchange Fabric to the site, which can help some clients. Since Equinix has a major focus on connectivity, we assume they’ll want to have the Quebec Internet Exchange on-site. We’ll still have to wait and see if 9300TC has enough peering customers to justify a new POP.
Talking about clients, we don’t expect local customers to go sign-up space in this DC. Montreal is a very unique market and clients like to work with local people. Furthermore, we don’t expect Equinix to be low on pricing, and Canadian SMBs often can’t afford to pay C$275+ per month for a cross-connect like many do in the US.
Where we do expect Equinix to shine is by bringing more customers to the market. Most of Equinix’s clients are present in more than one market and want to deal with a single provider for all their POPs. Montreal has cheap green and renewable power, and that might be of interest to some existing Equinix customers that are open to migrating some workloads to reduce their operating costs and carbon footprint.
It won’t be an easy game, but we wish them the best of luck.
Let’s wait and see what happens next !
Edit: Equinix’s Montreal data center will be know under code name “MT1”.