CenturyLink Wants to Sell its Data Centers

CenturyLink, the telecommunications company with a substantial data center services business, no longer wants to own its massive data center fleet.

The company has hired financial advisors to help it explore alternatives to ownership of its nearly 60 data centers in the US, Asia, and Europe, totaling more than 180 MW of power and 2.6 million square feet of data center space. It does not own all of those facilities, leasing a lot of its footprint from data center providers.

The company plans to continue providing colocation and other data center services. Potential alternatives to owning the massive portfolio are joint ventures or sale of all or some of the facilities.

CenturyLink gained much of its data center portfolio when it acquired data center service provider Savvis in 2011 for $2.5 billion. The company has been expanding its data center capacity continuously. Earlier this year it announced that it had completed data center expansion in six markets.

In a statement, CenturyLink CEO Glen Post said he was confident in the company’s business strategy around network, hosting, and managed services.

“We expect colocation services to remain part of our service offerings, but we do not believe ownership of the physical data center assets is necessary to effectively deliver those services,” he said. “Therefore, we are exploring all of the strategic alternatives available for our data centers.”