As the cloud gains popularity among endusers, cloud providers are looking for opportunities to expand their business through data center acquisitions. Primarily, acquisitions have occurred in the colocation and wholesale industries, and even more so in the large carrier type data centers. Due to the technology infrastructure installed within the large carrier type data centers, the value of these facilities has rocketed, as in the case of Google buying the 111 8th Ave. data center in New York for $1.9 billion. With this said, cloud providers also are looking to expand their business by acquiring data centers in other markets.
Historically, there have been two data center markets with acquisition activity; wholesale and retail colocation. Recently, there has been an uptick in activity with cloud providers as they acquire data centers to support expanded service offerings.