Data centre owner and operator Cologix has bought CIM Group’s interest in the TOR4 facility and will also acquire the adjacent TOR5 property, expanding its Greater Toronto Area holdings by 14 megawatts (MW) and 90,000 square feet of space.

Financial details of the transactions have not been released.

The two U.S.-based companies were partners in developing TOR4, which is located in the City of Markham just north of Toronto. TOR4 has been part of Cologix’s ScalelogixSM portfolio and was purpose-built for hyperscale and enterprise deployments with direct cloud onramps, low-latency connectivity and robust interconnection.

Both TOR4 and TOR5 are located at the Clegg Road data centre hub which has been developed over the past several years. The transactions make Cologix the sole owner of the two properties.

“Our joint venture with CIM Group has been instrumental in accelerating our growth in Toronto - one of North America’s most critical digital edge markets,” Cologix CEO Laura Ortman said in the announcement. “With full ownership of TOR4 and the addition of TOR5, we are deepening our investment in Canada and delivering more control, scale and performance for hyperscalers, enterprises and service providers, advancing Toronto’s role as a hub for AI inference ecosystems.”

Other major Canadian data centre announcements

The announcement is the second significant development in the GTA data centre sector in the past few weeks. 

Competing data centre operator Urbacon Data Centre Solutions (UDCS) recently announced that it has secured $320 million in financing for the development of the next three facilities at its Richmond Hill campus. That facility is also located just north of the city of Toronto.

On completion, DC4, DC5 and DC6 will offer almost 90 MW of new computing capacity. That would bring the campus in the Barker Business Park to 150 MW of total hyperscale data centre capacity across six buildings.

The Greater Toronto Area has the largest concentration of data centres in Canada.

In another major shift in the country's data centre sector, Toronto-based telecom giant Rogers Communications announced in August it is selling nine of its 12 data centres across the country to U.K.-based InfraRed Capital Partners. Rogers owns data centres in Ontario, Alberta and Halifax.

That decision is designed to relieve some of Rogers' debt load in the wake of its $26-billion takeover of rival Shaw Communications. InfraRed is owned by Canadian financial services company Sun Life.

Cologix growing Canadian presence

Denver-based Cologix has been steadily expanding its Canadian presence, usually via joint ventures to develop new facilities and then acquiring full ownership upon completion. In its announcement of these latest transactions, Cologix states the model offers it “a scalable approach to entering and expanding in high-demand markets.”

The company now operates a portfolio of 22 data centres across Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver, providing 1,057,000 square feet of space and 94 MW of power. Cologix also has a Canadian interconnection ecosystem of 350 networks, 200-plus cloud providers, 15 public cloud onramps and three internet exchanges. 

Cologix is the leading provider of public cloud onramps in Canada, including Amazon Web Services Direct Connect, Google Cloud Interconnect, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute and Oracle FastConnect.

Across North America, Cologix now offers over 45 hyperscale edge data centres and interconnection hubs across 12 markets.

CIM is a Los Angeles-based real estate and infrastructure owner, operator, lender and developer. Since 1994, CIM has delivered over $60 billion of real estate and infrastructure projects.