Vantage’s flagship Montreal QC1 campus, offering 11MW capacity on five acres of land. (Courtesy Business Wire)

Vantage Data Centers will invest an additional $900 million to scale its Canadian operations, which will include the development of a third campus in Montreal and the expansion of two existing campuses in Montreal and Quebec City.

This will make for a total of four Canadian data centres for the Denver-headquartered company. The expansion of its QC4 Montreal campus with a new facility, once completed in the fourth quarter of this year, will total 21MW and 94,000 square feet. Additionally, it will offer its customers 48MW of IT capacity and be powered by 99.5 per cent renewable energy from Hydro-Québec.

The wholly new Montreal campus, QC6, will also be powered with the same Hydro-Québec energy. The first phase is planned to open in October and will be located near Dorval’s Pierre-Elliott Trudeau Airport.

Net-zero emissions by 2030

Vantage’s expansion for QC2 in Quebec City involves the acquisition of an additional eight acres.

QC2 will be funded with sustainability-linked financing offered by  Société Générale, a French multi-national investment bank and financial services group offering sustainability-linked financing options. A portion of the campus was approved for the ‘green loan’, a first for Vantage, by meeting specific requirements.

This included the aforementioned renewable energy use, the low amount of anticipated carbon emissions, water conservation and an energy management plan to ensure high operational performance.

Another requirement is what Vantage calls an “industry-leading” power usage effectiveness ratio, which is the ratio of the total amount of energy used by a computer data centre facility to the energy delivered to computing equipment.

Vantage’s four campuses will total 143MW of IT capacity in the province with a combined investment approaching $1.7 billion. The company has also pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.

The combined investment in Quebec of $1.7B

“Our continued investment and expansion in the Province of Quebec cements Vantage Data Centers as the largest hyperscale digital infrastructure provider in Canada,” said Maxime Guévin, vice-president and general manager of Vantage’s Canadian business in a statement.

“The Quebec Province is an ideal location for data centres due to our green and affordable power options, rich connectivity, cool climate and business-friendly culture. We look forward to welcoming our global customers to our new facilities later this year.”

The same press release notes an aggressive expansion from Vantage in the province since its January 2019 acquisition of the Canadian company 4Degrees Colocation from Videotron Ltd. for $259 million.

Vantage is headquartered in Denver and has campuses around the world including in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Japan and Australia.

It first entered six European markets in 2020 and is expected to complete construction on its Johannesburg, South Africa campus this summer.

This past February, it had announced a 16 MW expansion to its flagship European campus in Offenbach, Germany, to be completed in the first half of 2024.

It was founded in 2010, thanks to an investment from the Californian private equity company Silver Lake Partners and its first acquisition was a data centre in Santa Clara formerly owned by Intel Corp.

In total, the company runs 26 campuses across 18 markets and five continents, totaling over 1.5 GW in power and over 10 million square feet.

In 2017, it was acquired by digital infrastructure investment firm, DigitalBridge Group Inc., based in Boca Raton, Fla., for US$1 billion.