Equinix said it will pay $161 million for two GPX Global Systems’ data centers in Mumbai, India.

The deal expands Equinix’s data center footprint to a new country, and it’s a strategic move for the interconnection giant.

According to Synergy Research Group, the data center market in India is expected to exceed $1 billion this year and grow at a 12% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2019-2024. This is the third-highest growth rate in the world, according to John Dinsdale, Synergy’s chief analyst and research director. “Our forecasts show that the country will become the seventh largest data center market in the world in 2021,” he added.

Under the agreement, Equinix will acquire GPX India’s business consisting of a fiber-connected campus in Mumbai with two data centers adding more than 1,350 cabinets with an additional 500 cabinets at full buildout. The facilities will add more than 90,000 square feet of colocation space to Platform Equinix when fully built.

Equinix expects the acquisition will close in the first quarter of 2021. Once the Mumbai campus is fully built out, Equinix expects the all-cash purchase to be 15 times the projected earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.

GPX India already offers direct interconnection services to major cloud providers via Amazon Direct Connect, Google Cloud Dedicated Interconnect, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect, among others, in a country where the cloud services market is expected to hit $7.1 billion by 2022, which represents a threefold increase from 2018.

The GXP India purchase follows several acquisitions and expansions over the last 12 months. Last month Equinix announced its flagship data center in Milan, which is the company’s fourth data center in Italy. And in June, it opened a 5G and edge computing test bed in Dallas and inked a deal to acquire 13 data center sites from Canada’s BCE Inc. for $750 million.

Also this year Equinix acquired bare-metal cloud startup Packet for $335 million, and it snagged a second $1 billion-plus joint venture with Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC to develop and operate hyperscale data centers in Japan. In October 2019, Equinix paid $175 million acquire three Axtel data centers in Mexico.