M&T Bank has announced that it has signed a letter of intent to purchase a building on Park Club Lane in the town of Amherst, NY, formerly operated as a data center by HSBC.

"At M&T Bank, we're pleased to be working with HSBC on this project to keep the data center generating new investment and jobs in the community," said Mark J. Czarnecki, president of M&T Bank.

M&T Bank plans to convert the 59,280-sq-ft building into its primary data center, then retrofit its current data center, located on Commerce Drive in Amherst, into additional office space. M&T said it will invest more than $105 million to improve and equip the two buildings over the next 10 years if the purchase goes through.

M&T also would locate approximately 75 new jobs and retain 45 existing jobs in Amherst as a direct result of this investment. Some of those jobs will be located at the new data center, while others will go in the Commerce Drive location.

M&T Bank already employs 1,314 people at two major operations centers and nine branch locations in the Town of Amherst. Across Western New York, M&T has approximately 5,000 employees, operates 84 branch office locations and owns and/or occupies nearly two million square feet of commercial real estate.

"As we've grown in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States, M&T's Western New York employment has more than doubled from 2,400 in 1999 to 5,000 today," said Czarnecki. "This new investment gives us the room we need to expand our technology infrastructure-and the room we need to add more new jobs."

The purchase is subject to additional due diligence and certain approvals from the Amherst Industrial Development Agency.

M&T Bank operates retail and commercial bank branches in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, New Jersey, Delaware, Florida, the District of Columbia, and Ontario, Canada.