Equinix Enters India with a $161M Mumbai Data Center Acquisition

Equinix is expanding into India, one of the world’s fastest growing markets for digital services.

The Redwood City, California-based colocation and interconnection giant announced Tuesday a $161 million acquisition of a two-data center campus in Mumbai by GPX Global Systems. Equinix’s Asia-Pacific footprint so far has consisted of facilities in Japan, China, Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia.

The campus ticks all the right boxes for Equinix strategy wise. According to the US company, several world-leading cloud service providers host their infrastructure there, as well as leading networks, CDNs, all local carriers, 130 internet service providers, and four internet exchanges.

The two facilities now have capacity to house 1,350 IT cabinets and room to add 500 more. At full buildout, the campus will provide 90,000 square feet of data center space.

The acquisition price represents a multiple of 15x projected EBITDA at full utilization, according to Equinix. It expects to close the transaction in the first quarter of 2021.

Indian market for digital services is growing quickly, and there’s been an uptick in investment in data centers in the country by both specialist data center providers and international cloud companies.

Equinix has been positioning itself as an operator of facilities where companies can interconnect with all the networks they need, including the networks of cloud providers. The GPX campus offers access to AWS Direct Connect, Google Cloud Dedicated Interconnect, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect.

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American hyperscalers have had data centers in India for years. But there’s now a new wave of investment in infrastructure by these companies. Google said in July that it will invest $10 billion in all types of digital infrastructure and services in the country over the next three years.

An Indian Microsoft executive said earlier this year that the company was planning more data center investment there. AWS is reportedly planning two additional data centers in India.

The opportunity for data center and cloud providers is to serve both domestic and international companies in India.

Small businesses have been digitizing rapidly in the country, according to a blog post by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, an India native. In addition to its own already robust IT industry concentrated in Mumbai, Chennai, and New Delhi, there’s a heavy presence of multinational enterprises.