Equinix, Inc. has announced that it has completed the purchase of Digital Realty's operating business in St. Denis, Paris, including its real estate and data center facility, for EUR €189,750,000 (approximately USD $211 million). The site currently houses Equinix's PA2 and PA3 International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers and the transaction furthers Equinix's corporate strategy of acquiring assets to invest behind customers and business ecosystems in key operating markets.

Purchasing St. Denis adds approximately 1,000 cabinets of sold capacity to the 5,000 cabinets Equinix has already sold in PA2 and PA3, plus expansion space for a further 1,000 cabinets in the existing buildings to support customer growth. The acquired facility is a dense interconnection site housing a core node of the Equinix Internet Exchange, one of the leading traffic exchanges in France.

"As one of the largest economies in Europe, France continues to be a strong destination for local French businesses, as well as multinationals. We believe that by fully owning the site of our PA2 and PA3 facilities and the surrounding land, we will be able to ensure additional capacity and the ability to interconnect more networks, clouds, people and data, as customers require in the future," said Steve Smith, president and CEO, Equinix.

Today, Equinix's seven Paris data centers are business hubs for more than 575 companies. With the current IT transformation underway, global enterprises increasingly leverage Platform Equinix™ for low-latency network connectivity, private access to a menu of cloud service providers and interconnection with customers and partners across their digital supply chain to run their corporate IT.

Equinix's Paris data centers provide significant carrier and cloud density, making them ideal sites to optimize network performance and deploy hybrid cloud architectures. Equinix's global interconnection platform provides access to over 160 network service providers and more than 100 cloud service providers in Paris for maximum connectivity to leading business services including Google Cloud Platform and IBM SoftLayer via Equinix Cloud Exchange.

The acquisition of the new Paris site enhances Equinix's recently expanded data center portfolio in EMEA. In January 2016 Equinix acquired TelecityGroup plc, which added 34 new data centers and seven new markets to the company's offering in the region including Dublin, Helsinki, Istanbul, Manchester, Sofia, Stockholm and Warsaw. Equinix now operates 146 IBX data centers in 40 markets, providing customers even more ways to connect with other businesses around the world on Platform Equinix.