Interxion Goes Public, Shares Gain 6 Percent

European IT infrastructure provider Interxion had a successful debut as a public company Friday as its shares gained 6 percent in their first day of trading, closing at $13.80 on the New York Stock Exchange. Shares of Interxion (trading as INXN) priced this morning at $13, the top end of the expected range of $11 to $13.

Interxion popped up sharply in early action, rising to $15.30 before slipping back over the remainder of the trading day. The company benefited from a trend of strong gains for data center stocks in the wake of Verizon’s $1.4 billion deal to acquire cloud hosting specialist Terremark.

The offering was initially planned for 18.6 million shares but grew to 20.37 million shares when existing stockholders decided to sell 4.12 million shares instead of the original 2.3 million. The company sold 16.25 million shares, which at $13 would net approximately $211 million, which will be used to build additional data center space and other "general corporate purposes."

The Interxion IPO was the first data center IPO of 2010. Last year CoreSite Realty (COR) went public as a real estate investment trust (REIT). See 2010: The Return of the Data Center IPO for full details.

Interxion is based in Amsterdam and operates 28 carrier-neutral data centers in 13 cities and 11 European countries. The company offers colocation, wholesale data center services and managed hosting, giving customers a broad set of choices.