Int’l Bytes: Verne Global, TI Sparkle, Earthlink, America Movil

Here’s some interesting news from around the world:

Iceland’s Verne Global has raised a new war chest for its data cente buildout. They’ve secured $98M in Series D funding, with Iceland’s Stefnir leading a new round of funding alongside additional investments from the Wellcome Trust, Novator Partners, and General Catalyst. Verne will use the funds to build out yet more of its renewable-energy-poweredc, 44-acre campus in Keflavik.

Equinix’s Cloud Exchange won some Italian favor yesterday. TI Sparkle, the international arm of Telecom Italia, has signed onto ECX. The initial deployments will be in Frankfurt and Singapore with the other 15 ECX markets on the way. TI Sparkle is launching a new Network-as-a-Service offering, and it wants a well-developed ecosystem to do it in.

Akamai picked up some business in Southeast Asia. Bangkok Bank is now using their CDN infrastructure to speed up its website performance around the world. The better performance will give Bangkok Bank a boost in its plas to grow its regional and international presence.

And Carlos Slim has begun to make his move to slim down in Mexico. America Movil plans to spin off a holding company called Sercotel in an effort to get its marketshare below 50%. The unit will have $2.08B in assets, although nobody seems to be quite sure what those assets are just yet, except Carlos Slim of course. The Mexican market has been evolving rapidly since regulators there started a campaign to increase competition and alleviate the incumbent’s stranglehold.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Content Distribution · Datacenter · Financials · ILECs, PTTs