The Ascendas Funds Management, as the manager of Ascendas Real Estate Investment Trust (Ascendas Reit), has acquired a portfolio of data centres located across Europe for S$904.6 million (US$ 673.4 million) from subsidiaries of Digital Realty.
The portfolio comprises of 11 data centres located across the United Kingdom (4 properties), the Netherlands (3 properties), France (3 properties) and Switzerland (1 property).
Mr William Tay, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Ascendas Funds Management said, "This acquisition gives us a unique opportunity to own a portfolio of well-occupied data centres located across key markets in Europe. It complements our existing data centre portfolio in Singapore and will increase the sector's contribution to S$1.5 billion or 10% of investment properties under management.”
With the data centre market in APAC gaining traction, Ascendas’ move to Europe would prove strategic as companies and their digital transformation efforts would increase the demand for colocation from cloud providers.
Moreover, the target portfolio of data centres in London, Amsterdam, and Paris are the top data centre markets in Europe that rank first, third, and fourth as the largest colocation markets respectively.
The data sovereignty laws are also expected to benefit the European data centres as more companies choose to store data within Europe to serve the large local markets.
