Digital Realty has beefed up its colocation facility in Toronto as businesses look to accelerate their digital transformations due to Covid-19.
Along with Northern Virginia, the Toronto metropolitan area has traditionally been one of the biggest locations for data center builds. The 6,000 square-foot expansion of Digital Realty's One Century Place—also known as TOR1— facility in Vaughn, Ontario, which is just north of Toronto, will add 1,500 kilowatts of colocation capacity for use by a broad range of customers across various industry verticals.
The facility, which was formerly the Toronto Star's printing press building, will help enterprises address their needs for more distributed data hosting, connectivity and exascale computing from a single campus. TOR1 will also enable enterprises to scale up their network and bandwidth requirements as needed. Digital Realty's PlatformDIGITAL solution enables customers to build the network they need for core to cloud solutions.
"Toronto is a more critical market than ever as businesses recognize the growing importance of the region as one of the next major technology hubs in North America," said Digital Realty CEO A. William Stein, in a statement "Today's announcement marks a significant milestone in the expansion of PlatformDIGITAL as we continue to expand our colocation capabilities in strategic regions around the world. We are enabling our customers to address the challenges of data gravity by deploying their digital infrastructure in close proximity to key cloud deployments, providing the coverage, capacity and connectivity requirements to support their current and future goals."
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To support customers in TOR1, Digital Realty is using IBM's Direct Link 2.0 capabilities to provide direct access to the IBM Cloud in Toronto. Direct Link 2.0 enables customers to spend less time designing and deploying network architectures to accelerate the development of new solutions via a hybrid cloud.
Digital Realty wrapped up the colocation expansion of TOR1 last month. It currently operates over 20 megawatts of capacity across two data centers in the Toronto region, with more than 60 megawatts planned at full build-out.
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Digital Realty and Equinix go mano a mano
Digital Realty and Equinix are the world's largest colocation providers, and both companies have been expanding this year. In June, Digital Realty and Ascenty announced they would build two new data centers in Mexico for a large global cloud provider. The two companies didn't identify the cloud provider that will be using the new facilities in Queretaro, Mexico, but did say they had long-term, multi-megawatt agreements in place.
Also in June, Vapor IO and Digital Realty launched their integrated platform that reaches from the network core to the edge in three cities. After announcing a partnership in October, the combination of Digital Realty's PlatformDIGITAL and Vapor IO's Kinetic Edge platform is now live in Atlanta, Dallas and Chicago.
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In March, Digital Realty closed its $8.4 billion deal to buy European data center operator Interxion.
Earlier this year, Equinix broadened its horizons across Canada by buying 13 data centers from Bell (BCE) for $750 million in cash. That acquisition is expected to close in the second half of this year once it passes customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.
In January, Equinix announced it was buying bare metal data center company Packet. When the deal closed in March, Equinix said it had paid $335 million for Packet. Equinix announced in October that it was buying three data centers from Axtel for $175 million.
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Also in October, Equinix announced it had completed the formation of a $1 billion joint venture with partner GIC, which is Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, to build and operate hyperscale data centers in Europe.
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Over the 2015-2020 period, the largest investors, by far, have been Digital Realty and Equinix, which are the world’s two leading colocation providers, according to Synergy Research Group. In aggregate they accounted for 35% of total deal value over that time frame. SRG has previously said it expects 2020 to be a bumper year for data center M&A activity.