The data centre sector has begun 2012 in bullish fashion reaffirming the long-term confidence and optimism suggested by previous analysis. In the new launch edition of Finance and Investment for Datacentres (F&I), a review of finance and investment in the data centre sector, consulting firm BroadGroup assessed all publicly available data across M&A, fund raising activity and build projects for the first quarter 2012.

F&I is a new source of finance and investment information and activity for the international data centre and cloud services industry which has just been launched.The new service tracks  investment in expansion and new build, M&A transactions and fund raising activity globally and includes the monthly AHV Index of publicly quoted companies in the sector. 

Data centre capacity has expanded substantially, with the mature markets of North America, UK and Australia who continue to dominate activity. Expansion and upgrade of datacentres, and M&A activity in the sector has been brisk with each seeing values of around US$4billion in the period. The research also found that funding trends are following trends seen in 2011, with a range of funding rounds, IPOs and credit extensions. The majority of transactions are under US$125 million.

“These figures indicate sustained strong interest and we expect a moderate percentage rise by the end of 2012,” commented Alex Preston, editor, F&I. “M&A is also on track to repeat the levels achieved last year, and we expect to see an increase.”

Performance has also been strong in quoted markets. Corporate finance advisor AHV has created a capitalization-weighted index of large, quoted companies that are directly involved in the data centre sector and is included in F&I. The AHV datacentre index has consistently outperformed both FTSE-100 and Nasdaq-100 since 2009. NYSE listed Interxion and 21Vianet and AIM listed CSF have recently been added to the tracker. More companies are expected to be added this year.