Tuesday Bytes: STT GDC, Orange, IBM, NEC

January 19th, 2021 by · Leave a Comment

One M&A, one new data center partnership, and two bits of subsea cable news to catch up on:

ST Telemedia GDC is expanding into a new market in East Asia. They are teaming up with Hyosung Heavy Industries in a 60:40 joint venture to develop and operate data centers in South Korea. The two companies are securing land in the Gretater Seoul metro area, after which they plan to build out a new campus in support of South Korea’s 5G and cloud ambitions.

Orange is making another transatlantic bandwidth investment. They have joined the consortium building the AMITIÉ cable, which will connect Bordeaux, France with Massachussetts. AMITIÉ will offer 16 fiber pairs of 23Tbps each and is expected to go live about a year from now. Others in that consortium include Facebook, Microsoft, Vodafone, and Aqua Comms. The new infrastructure will complement Orange’s piece of the Dunant subsea cable.

IBM has made an inorganic move on the cloud front. They have entered into an agreement to acquire Taos, a cloud-focused managed service provider. The plan is to leverage the multi-cloud expertise of Taos to further IBM’s hybrid cloud ambitions. It’s IBM’s third cloud-focused acquisition of the winter, following up on deals for the Salesforce consultancy 7Summits and the Helsinki-based cloud integrator Nordcloud.

And NEC has signed a contract to build the Palau Cable 2 cable system in the South Pacific. The project will span just 110km, and will connect the island republic of Palau over to the SEA-US cable which passes by just to the north of it. From there Palau will be able to hook up to big bandwidth to both the US and to southeast Asia, complementing the first cable NEC built for the island. The PC2 system is expected to come online by the end of next year.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Datacenter · Mergers and Acquisitions · Undersea cables

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