Friday Bytes: Grain, Quintillion, Nile, DataBank, TELUS, Samsung

Some M&A news, some WiFi access, some balance sheet work, and some more vRAN and Open RAN.

Grain Management has completed the purchase of Quintillion up in Alaska. Quintillion will be busy implementing some $89M of funding awards from the NTIA’s Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure Grant Program. They are also working on a subsea link connecting Nome to Homer. Of course Quintillion has had longstanding ambitions to connect Asia to Europe via the Northwest Passage, and it will be interesting to see whether we see any action on that front under the Grain Management umbrella.

Nile has lined up a customer for its AI-powered NaaS platform in the education vertical. The University of Denver has selected the technology to support its new campus network. The network will link multiple sites, including a WiFi upgrade for two dorms with capacity for 1,100 students and 2,500+ connections and ten more dorms in the wings.

DataBank has tapped the green financing markets for another $456M. The secured notes will be their fourth such financing move in the past 3 years, with the proceeds going to refinance the bridge loan they used to buy four data centers in Houston from CyrusOne in 2022 as well as to fund new development. The company has a goal of carbon neutrality by 2030.

TELUS has partnered with Samsung to deploy next generation wireless technologies on its 5G footprint. The two will be expanding their existing relationship to build a virtualized Open RAN platform. The plan is to enable TELUS to leverage multiple vendors as well as to make better use of software and thus enabling faster upgrades to new technologies. Deployment will be ongoing throughout 2024.

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Categories: Datacenter · Mergers and Acquisitions · Software · Telecom Equipment · Wireless