Telecommunications company Liberty Global and Digital Colony, a global digital infrastructure investment firm, have announced plans to launch a European Edge data center joint venture, called AtlasEdge Data Center.
The Joint Venture (JV) will manage more than 100 edge data centers in Europe, combining the edge assets in the Digital Colony and Liberty Global real estate portfolios. AtlasEdge Data Centers will be directed by Josh Joshi, the former CFO of Interxion. In the new business, Liberty Global will devote its digital infrastructure assets, including technical real estate portfolios, as well as strategic and operational business support. The Digital Colony will contribute operational expertise, strategic direction and capital to provide a foundation for the growth and merger of edge co-location service capabilities across Europe.
AtlasEdge will provide services through a wide network of devices close to the consumers and enterprise end users. The company’s goal is to meet the cloud providers, streaming services and enterprises’ growing needs for high-efficiency and expansive and secure solutions, so that these participants can migrate low-latency applications and services such as 5G, IoT and edge compute.
Mike Fries, CEO of Liberty Global, commented: “The proposed joint venture presents significant growth opportunities as we look to build this business into a leading European edge data centre operator. Furthermore, since several of our operating companies will become anchor tenants, Liberty Global customers will also benefit from better and more responsive services.”
As traffic increases and shifts towards the edge of the network, AtlasEdge’s capability to connect to the edge and effectively disperse vital and content-intensive data traffic will become more and more important. This joint venture is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2021, subject to regulatory and merger control approval.
