Equinix, the global interconnection and data centre company, today announced that it has closed a transaction for the purchase of a commercial building at Vierenkamp 1, Hamburg, Germany, from Aspen REG 1. Management GmbH for $11 million (€9 million). Equinix will invest another $25 million (€22 million) to redevelop the space in phase one. The facility, which will be renamed the Equinix HH1 International Business Exchange™ (IBX) data centre, will extend the company’s global interconnection platform, Platform Equinix, into a fourth market in Germany and will help meet growing demand for digital infrastructure connectivity throughout Europe. The acquisition was completed on December 28, 2018, and the new site is expected to be open for business in Q3 2019.
With a population of more than five million, the Hamburg metro area is the second-largest city in Germany and has a large concentration of multinational enterprises, including large automotive and consumer packaged goods companies. Additionally, the city is home to a growing technology community, including many e-commerce companies which require low latency, increased bandwidth and connectivity to industry-leading networking and cloud services providers.
To meet this demand, Equinix will refurbish the existing two-story industrial building, which is approximately 130,000 square feet (12,000 square meters), and transform the space into an interconnection and carrier-neutral colocation environment. The redevelopment will deliver 375 cabinets in phase one with the ability to expand to 1,875 cabinets at full build.
As a part of their IT transformation, enterprises increasingly require low-latency network connectivity, access to cloud service providers in top global markets and interconnection with customers and partners across their digital supply chain to run their corporate IT. The new HH1 IBX data centre will enable Equinix customers to evolve from traditional businesses to ‘digital businesses’ whereby they globally interconnect with people, locations, cloud services and data. Additionally, customers will have the opportunity to operate on an expanded global platform to process, store and distribute larger volumes of latency-sensitive data and applications at the digital edge, closer to end users and local markets.
The new HH1 IBX data centre will be strategically located in proximity to the North Sea, which will provide easy access for subsea cable landing stations, as Hamburg is a top interconnection point for cables connecting to Frankfurt. Equinix has won more than 20 subsea cable landing deals in recent years. Today, Equinix’s Germany data centres are business hubs for over 900 companies across nine facilities located in Frankfurt, Munich and Dusseldorf.
Eric Schwartz, president, EMEA, Equinix, commented: “The German economy continues to be a source of strength in Europe, and demand for interconnection continues to rise to meet the IT transformation needs of businesses. By expanding to a fourth market in Germany, Equinix will provide multinational customers with greater choice of where they build their digital edge.”
