Linxdatacenter, a colocation, cloud, and connectivity solutions provider, today announced it has been acquired by a consortium of investors including the Russian Direct Investment Fund (Russia’s sovereign wealth fund), ER-Telecom (a Russian telecommunications company operating under the Dom.ru brand), and Talos Fund I LP (an undisclosed Middle East investment fund). The company was sold by Koop Holding Europe (a vehicle of Linxdatacenter’s CEO Heiko Koop) and a number of private investors.
Linxdatacenter – Russia Data Centers
Linxdatacenter is the fifth largest data center operator in Russia through its two facilities in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Overall, the company offers 2.0k cabinets and 17 megawatts of power capacity, comprising 144k sqft (13.4k sqm) of space.
Moscow
Linxdatacenter’s Moscow facility offers 5 megawatts of power capacity across 47.4k sqft (4.4k sqm) of space.
St. Petersburg
Linxdatacenter’s St. Petersburg facility offers 12 megawatts of power capacity across 96.9k sqft (9.0k sqm) of space.
Cloud Growth Opportunity – Linxdatacenter
Currently, only 20% of Linxdatacenter’s business comes from cloud service providers (instead its revenues are mainly from colocation). However, the company and its new investors foresee the expansion of its cloud services as a significant future growth opportunity. Indeed, Linxdatacenter already offers connectivity to global cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, as these companies do not have their own data centers in Russia.
Over the next two years, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, ER-Telecom, and Talos Fund plan to significantly increase the power capacity of Linxdatacenter by expanding its existing data centers and building-out new facilities. Through this expansion, the consortium intends to position Linxdatacenter as a leader in the cloud storage and virtual data processing market.
The company will target its services towards the largest Russian and international enterprises, with a particular focus on serving customers that have artificial intelligence workloads. Additionally, the majority of data center workloads in Russia remain on-premise. Therefore, as enterprises increasingly outsource these workloads, providers like Linxdatacenter will benefit.
Russia Competitors – Data Centers
Overall, a number of companies in Russia are seeking to capitalize on the country’s need for more data center infrastructure. Indeed, these competitors include Rostelecom, IXcellerate, DataPro, and MTS (Avantage). Recently, significant demand for these third-party data center facilities in Russia has come from Chinese hyperscale customers. Specifically, these companies include Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, and Huawei.
At the same time, the largest publicly-traded data center operators, including Equinix and Digital Realty, do not own data center facilities in Russia. Moreover, recent commentary from both companies suggests that Russia is not on their radar as a new market to enter.
