Australia’s AMP Acquires US Data Center Provider Expedient

Expedient is the latest company to be acquired in a wave of M&A activity surging through the data center services industry.

Australian investment manager AMP Capital has agreed to acquire the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based provider of cloud, colocation, and managed services from Landmark Media Enterprises, which has been Expedient’s backer for 14 years.

Expedient operates data centers in 11 locations around the US and uses multiple “partner facilities,” offering security, compliance, and disaster recovery services besides data center space and cloud infrastructure built on VMware.

Terms of the private equity deal were not disclosed.

This is AMP’s first foray into the data center services business. Its institutional-investor clients have been attracted to the space by the promise of high growth fueled by increasing use of digital services and the drive by companies to outsource their data center functions to providers like Expedient.

This recent spike in new investor interest, in combination with several other factors, has resulted in what amounts to tens of billions of dollars’ wort of data center assets as potential acquisition targets.

“This investment is AMP Capital’s first data center/Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) acquisition,” Matt Evans, global head of communications for AMP’s recently formed Infrastructure Equity team, said in a statement. “We have been seeking the right investment globally through which to enter this highly attractive sector. Increasing IP traffic, the growing complexity and capital intensity of managing in-house infrastructure, and evolving regulatory requirements are driving demand in the outsourced cloud and data center space.”

Related:Tons of Data Center Businesses on the Market. Not All Will Sell

Earlier this month Expedient announced a westward expansion of its infrastructure, adding an office in Phoenix and two cloud-infrastructure locations in western US. The move appears to have been driven by a single Phoenix-based enterprise client, for whom the company is building a cloud node in the region.

Expedient’s infrastructure until now has been concentrated in central and eastern US.