Another $100,000,000 datacenter investment shows strength of the business

In a week dominated by ‘the sky is falling” press coverage about the evil datacenter business,  Canadian datacenter operator Cogeco Cable announced the investment of $100 million in a new datacenter that will serve the web hosting and data management  needs of their customers.  The plans are to open a 100,000 sq ft datacenter in Montreal by 2014, adding to their existing portfolio of seven datacenters.

Cogeco  is a newcomer to the datacenter business, having jump started their involvement last year with the acquisition of datacenter provider Quiettouch and their five existing datacenters, now operating as Cogeco Data Services. The parent company increased their original investment in the business by opening a sixth datacenter in Toronto earlier this year, giving them 5 datacenters in the Metro Toronto area and one in Vancouver.

CEO Louis Audet sees the opportunities for new markets as a major one for Cogeco, and is encouraged by the 8 percent annual growth that the datacenter business has been enjoying. Cogeco has been expanding through the acquisition of both telecom and cable providers, including the $1.3 billion acquisition of a US cable provider, Atlantic Broadband, earlier this year.

Canada has a couple of major advantages for datacenter providers. It is a very stable region, both politically and tectonically, and the overall annual temperatures mean that building with state-of-the-art free-air cooling techniques gives them a head start on designing energy efficient datacenters with reduced environmental impact.