Embiggened CenturyLink flogs off data centres

Fresh from its giga-acquisition of Level 3 Communications, CenturyLink is selling off 57 data centres to a bunch of private venture firms.

The company says it wants to put the US$2.15 billion it expects from the sale towards the Level 3 acquisition.

A consortium led by BC Partners and Medina Capital (with Longview Asset Management also taking a slice) will buy the real estate. CenturyLink will retain a $150 million minority stake in the company the consortium establishes, and will keep its colocation, hosting and cloud assets in the bit barns.

At the end of October, CenturyLink announced its $43 billion slurp of Level 3 Communications, a move designed to give the telco/ISP access to L3's fibre backbone network.

In its Friday release discussing the data centre sale, the company says the portfolio covers 2.6 million square feet (252,000 square metres) of space and 195 MW of power.

Medina Capital's statement says there are 3,500 customers in the facilities.

As well as the CenturyLink data centres, the consortium company will flog a variety of security services from Medina's portfolio, including the Cryptzone “software defined perimeter” offering, Catbird's cloud policy enforcement software, Easy Solutions fraud detection, and machine learning / analytics from Brainspace. ®