Iron Mountain today announced it has agreed to acquire a data center in Frankfurt, Germany from a Keppel Corporation-controlled entity, Calcium DC Pte Ltd, for cash consideration of €76m. Specifically, the facility is a two-story, 215k sqft (20.0k sqm) colocation data center with 10.6 megawatts of power capacity.
Iron Mountain is buying the Frankfurt facility from Calcium DC Pte Ltd, a 60%/40% joint venture between Alpha DC Fund Private Limited and Keppel Data Centres Holding Pte. Ltd, which is divesting the data center known as Keppel DC Frankfurt 1.
Finally, the transaction is expected to close by early October 2021.
Frankfurt (FRA-2) Data Center
Iron Mountain is acquiring the data center located at Heinrich-Lanz-Allee 47, in Frankfurt, Germany. The site is on freehold land and resides in the Am Martinszehnten Industrial Park. Indeed, this location is ~6 miles (10 kilometers) from the city center and ~10 miles (16 kilometers) from Frankfurt Airport.
Utilization
The facility is currently under-utilized with only 2.6 megawatts of leased capacity. An incremental 8.0 megawatts of capacity is available for retail colocation customers. Additionally, Iron Mountain notes that it has the option to expand the building in the future to add edge computing at the premises.
Connectivity
Iron Mountain’s new data center has carrier-neutral access to networks, on-site peering exchanges such as DE-CIX, and links into public cloud on-ramps.
Valuation
Keppel Corporation notes that its book value for the Frankfurt data center, as of year-end 2020, was €63.0m. In turn, this implies a €13.0m gain on the divestment for the sellers.
Frankfurt Presence – Iron Mountain
Overall, Iron Mountain’s new Frankfurt facility enables the company to add immediate capacity to satisfy demand from enterprise, edge, and hyperscale customers. Indeed, this acquisition in Frankfurt will be the company’s second data center in the market.
Notably, in October 2020, Iron Mountain announced plans to develop a 27-megawatt hyperscale data center in Frankfurt (FRA-1). Iron Mountain was able to successfully pre-lease the entirety of this €300m+ facility to Google Cloud on a 10-year term.
Frankfurt, one of Europe’s Tier-1 FLAP markets, benefits from being a key commercial and financial hub on the continent. Additionally, Frankfurt has a strong connectivity ecosystem of network fabrics and service providers. Finally, the market offers a robust power supply, however, Frankfurt may soon implement restrictions relating to the growth in power usage.
Iron Mountain – Data Center Portfolio
Iron Mountain’s data center portfolio comprises 15 operational facilities across 13 markets in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Including today’s announcement and the company’s recently closed Web Werks joint venture, Iron Mountain will be able to support nearly 460 megawatts of IT capacity at full build-out.
