Canada’s data centre market size will grow to $3.5 billion at a CAGR of 3 per cent between 2020 to 2025, driven by strong demands of international and intranational business and IT services.
Equinix, a colocation data centre and interconnect company, in particular, made a strong expansion in Canada by purchasing 13 data centre sites from Bell for CA$1.04 billion in June. The 13 data centre sites hold 25 of Bell’s facilities. The exchange benefits Equinix’s colocation data centre business as well as Bell’s efforts to secure more funds for the upcoming mid-band 5G wireless spectrum auction in June 2021.
“As you think about Canada and the opportunity there, we’re certainly very bullish about that,” said Jon Lin, president of Equinix Americas. “A lot of the activity that we’re starting to see on ECX fabric [the Equinix Exchange Fabric, a private, software-defined interconnect] isn’t just enterprises connecting to the cloud, but increasingly, it’s enterprises connecting to other people inside of their digital supply chain and exchanging data around business partners that they need to move data around. Whether that’s healthcare providers passing that data to each other, or sometimes it’s IoT providers looking at sensor data and being able to talk to their end customers who they’ve sold infrastructure to.”
Equinix predicts that by 2022, at least 60 per cent of global GDP will be digitized and that the digital ecosystems will account for more than $60 trillion in revenue by 2025. It also predicts that by 2022, installed interconnection bandwidth capacity worldwide is expected to reach more than 13 petabytes per second with a 51 per cent compound annual growth rate.
As highlighted in a report by BuddeComm, Canada has strong financial ties with Northeast U.S., which will heavily drive the data centre performance for banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), as well as IT-enabled service (ITeS). That demand has only grown during the COVID-19 pandemic. Equinix, along with Cologix, EStruxture, and several others are at the forefront of the competition in the data centre market. Even with the increased internet traffic, experts predict that the COVID-19 pandemic won’t severely impact data centre operations in Canada.
Once Equinix’s latest acquisition completes in the second half of 2020, it will have more than 220 data centre sites under its belt. It will also bring its Equinix Exchange Fabric to all Canadian data centres.