The acquisitions of two additional Toronto data centres marks the latest Canadian expansion for Cologix, a Denver-based company that has been steadily expanding its holdings north of the border. It won't be the last.

Cologix recently acquired full ownership of TOR4, a hyperscale data centre in Markham, Ont., through the purchase of former development joint venture partner CIM Group’s interest. It is also acquiring TOR5, adjacent to TOR4 at 105 Clegg Rd. in the city north of Toronto, from CIM Group.

The prices for the acquisitions haven’t been disclosed.

Cologix powers digital infrastructure with more than 45 hyperscale edge data centres and interconnection hubs across 12 North American markets, with a heavy presence in Canada.

Cologix operates 22 data centres across the Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver markets, providing 1,057,000 square feet of space and 94 megawatts of power. It has a Canadian interconnection ecosystem of 350 networks, more than 200 cloud providers, 15 public cloud onramps and three Internet exchanges.

Los Angeles-headquartered CIM Group is a real estate and infrastructure owner, operator, lender and developer that has delivered more than $60 billion of real estate and infrastructure projects since 1994.

TOR4 and TOR5

TOR4 and TOR5 deliver a combined 14 megawatts of capacity in more than 90,000 square feet of space and offer "meaningful" capacity expansion potential for the Toronto market.

“Data centres in our major markets are forming the critical interconnection infrastructure to enable and accelerate technology innovation,” Toronto-based Cologix Canada president and general manager Sean Maskell told RENX.

“While we're growing those tight systems, we need to continue to keep adding edge markets that are connected back to what we consider our foundational principle, which is a highly interconnected facility.”

Cologix’s Toronto interconnection hub is the TOR1 facility at 151 Front St. in the downtown core. TOR4 and TOR5 are spokes connected to that hub along with TOR2 and TOR3, which are located in Toronto’s downtown west at 905 King St. W.

Vancouver and Montreal

Cologix uses similar hub and spoke models in Montreal, where it has 12 data centres, and Vancouver, where it has five — with a sixth soon to be added.

“Vancouver has been one of the fastest-growing metros in Canada for us over the last few years and we're going to continue to strengthen and bolster our position there,” Maskell said.

Cologix has a full growth pipeline in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal through both expansion and continued investment in existing facilities, according to Maskell.

“Hyperscalers started coming to the market — such as AWS and GCP, which is Google — to deploy their clouds to start providing those services to consumers,” Maskell said. “They needed a larger footprint with higher power densities, but still needed to be interconnected so that the folks who are consuming that information could consume it. 

“So the growth strategy is to connect secondary tethered facilities back to the carrier hotel, but those facilities again could handle those higher densities.”

Growing importance of artificial intelligence

More widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating the need for increased power densities and that momentum is expected to keep growing. 

“Companies are looking for facilities that they can move into, similar to what happened with cloud, where folks wanted to get cloud-adjacent,” Maskell explained. 

“We're now seeing those enterprises want to get AI-adjacent and use companies that can author GPU-as-a-Service (graphics processing unit) so that they can dip their toe into the water and start using and consuming those systems in a low-cost way as they continue to modernize.”

GPU-as-a-Service is designed for tasks including AI, machine learning and 3D rendering that require massive parallel processing capabilities. 

Cologix recently announced its collaboration with AI cloud service provider Consensus Core to support the needs of AI technologies at its MTL10 data centre in Montreal. This will enable Consensus Core to launch a new NVIDIA-powered GPU-as-a-Service in the Canadian market and transform MTL10 into a hub for its high-performance AI workloads.

Focus on sustainability

Montreal’s 205,000-square-foot, LEED Gold-targeted MTL8 will come online this year with 21 megawatts of power. 

The facility’s cooling system is designed for maximum energy efficiency to optimize functionality while reducing the energy required to operate it. MTL8 will use renewable energy power from Hydro-Quebec.

“Sustainability used to be nice to have, but now it's non-negotiable, and Cologix has really embraced a sustainability strategy,” said Maskell. “Last year, 65 per cent of our energy came from carbon-free sources, which we're very proud of.”

Cologix’s 2024 emissions intensity was flat from the previous year despite a more than 40 per cent increase in its square footage.

One of the reasons Canada is a great data centre market is that its cooler climate acts as a free air conditioner. The country also has a stable regulatory environment and strong data sovereignty laws so businesses can keep their information close to home.

“When you combine clean power, smart policy and strong infrastructure, you create perfect environments for tech to thrive,” said Maskell. “This is about building the foundation for all tech — AI, cloud, 5G and content delivery — and it all lives within data centres.

"And Canada is uniquely positioned to be a global leader.” 

Further Canadian expansion

Cologix has a Denver-based real estate and growth team that Maskell said is continually evaluating additional Canadian markets that might fit the company’s growth strategy.

“We're not just going to purchase a facility for the sake of purchasing it,” Maskell said. “They need to be good buys. 

“We need to be good stewards of our investors’ money and we're going to continue to follow our playbook, which has led us to the success we're seeing today.”

To consider expanding into a new market, Maskell said there would have to be an “underpinning of interconnection” with a large amount of fibre in one area, and where that hub could be expanded through tethered spokes.