GI Becomes Data Center Landlord for BT’s Trading Hub in New Jersey

GI Partners has bought a large New Jersey data center that houses tech platforms that facilitate capital markets trading by customers of BT Radianz, the financial tech services business of BT Americas, a division of British Telecom.

BT has been the sole tenant in the 130,000-square foot building and will continue to be one. GI’s announcement didn’t specify who the previous owner was, but according to Essex County records, the owner through at least 2017 was Reckson Associates, a division of the New York-based real estate investment trust SL Green Realty.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Companies spent more money on data center acquisitions in 2017 than in any prior year, and data center real estate experts say the trend will continue in 2018. It’s only February, and the dollar value of data center transactions announced this year is already in the neighborhood of $1 billion.

Equinix’s $800 million Infomart Dallas acquisition, announced last week, is responsible for most of that sum, but others have contributed too. Evocative, a smaller data center services player, announced two deals since January 1. GI itself announced another acquisition earlier this year: a data center in Montreal built by Ericsson.

Its most recently purchased data center and office building at 492 River Road in Nutley, New Jersey, is one of the core Radianz locations. Radianz services provides applications for market data, buy-side, sell-side, liquidity, and clearing and settlement to support traders in the global capital markets.

Related:Here are the 5 Biggest Data Center Acquisitions of 2017

In addition to Radianz, BT Americas uses the building to provide disaster recovery, cloud, and managed services.

GI, the San Francisco-based private equity firm, has been one of the biggest investors in the data center market over the years. Including the BT building in New Jersey, it now owns and manages 22 data centers across 13 markets – a total footprint of 5.3 million square feet – and that’s not counting its ownership of Flexential, the national data center services giant formed after last year’s merger between Peak 10 and ViaWest. GI’s past portfolio companies include Digital Realty, SoftLayer, and Telx.