Equinix is reportedly in talks to buy Mexican telecommunication’s company Axtel SAB’s data center for about $200 million, according to a Bloomberg report.
Equinix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The deal would mark Equinix’s first facilities in Mexico, and it follows other acquisitions that aim to expand the data center giant’s Latin American presence.
Last year Equinix paid $800 million for the Infomart Dallas, a major interconnection hub for the Southwest U.S. And in late 2016 it bought 24 Verizon data centers for $3.6 billion spanning the U.S. and Latin America. Those purchases, “and our existing locations in Los Angeles and Sao Paolo really provides us a big Pan-LatAm strategy,” said Jon Lin, VP for corporate development and strategy at Equinix, in an earlier interview.
Equinix wants to aggressively expand in Mexico, according to Bloomberg. The Axtel data centers would give it a launching pad for this and enable Equinix to challenge local providers including billionaire Carlos Slim, who controls the Mexican data center market. AT&T and Telefonica have tried unsuccessfully to wrestle market share from Slim, the report said.
Equinix Spends Billions on Data Center GrowthIn addition to growing its Latin American footprint, Equinix over the past few years has pumped billions of dollars into expanding its global presence. It opened its 11th data center in Tokyo, which is its largest to date in Japan, plus new facilities in Sydney, Seoul, and Singapore.
Also this year Equinix closed an $11 million deal to buy a commercial building in Hamburg, Germany, bringing its interconnection platform into a fourth market in that country. In April it purchased a data center business in Amsterdam for $34 million. And in July it formed a joint venture valued at more than $1 billion with GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, to build and operate xScale data centers in Europe that target the world’s biggest cloud providers.
Equinix owns 200 data centers in 52 markets in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific regions.
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