Verizon Communications Inc. on Dec. 7 announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell 24 data center sites to Redwood City, Calif.-based Equinix in a transaction valued at $3.6 billion.
Equinix will own and manage 24 Verizon customer-facing data sites, consisting of 29 data center buildings, in the United States and Latin America. The deal is expected to close by mid-2017.
The transaction aligns with Verizon’s strategy to focus on driving digital transformation for enterprise customers, not running data centers.
The sale does not affect Verizon’s managed hosting and cloud offerings, or its data center services delivered from 27 sites in Europe, Asia-Pacific and Canada.
Citi and Guggenheim Partners are acting as financial advisors to Verizon. Jones Day is acting as legal advisor to Verizon.
Included in the deal for Equinix is Verizon’s Miami Network Access Point (NAP), also called the NAP of the Americas. NOTA is a pivotal transit location for data between the U.S and Latin America, in addition to being an interconnection point for about 90 global networks.
Equinix, whose data centers provide global interconnection for public and private networks, has been busy incorporating Open Compute Project (OCP) technology designed by Facebook to develop a new open source-based ecosystem inside its International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers.
Equinix and Facebook have been collaborating to build a diverse, open source platform for both software and hardware. Building on contributions to OCP, this ecosystem will be built on a new, open source architecture that will enable faster innovation and create greater efficiency in data center and hybrid cloud deployments.
To facilitate this ecosystem, Wedge open source switches developed by Facebook and contributed to OCP will be part of the new architecture inside Equinix. By working with Facebook to build this ecosystem, Equinix is able to provide its enterprise customers with an improved environment to push technology boundaries and develop next-generation interconnection networks.
Interconnection networks differ from standard data centers in that they serve as crossroads and optimizers for large public and private networks, rather than as physical stations for server, storage and networking equipment.