Tuesday Bytes: Point Broadband, EXA, Vantage

Two bits of M&A news and a strategic partnership:

There was a bit of M&A in the last mile to start the year. Point Broadband has signed a definitive agreement to combine with Clearwave Fiber. Point Broadband operates in 10 states across the south, southeast, east, and Midwest, while Clearwave operates in Illinois, Kansas, Georgia, and Florida. But Clearwave’s southern Illinois assets are already being purchased by Metro Communications, and those aren’t part of this deal. The combined company will be led by Clearwave CEO David Armistead and owned by the existing shareholders GTCR, Berkshire Partners, and Cable One.

EXA Infrastructure has closed its purchase of Aqua Comms, putting it in direct ownership of an even more substantial chunk of the industry’s transatlantic cables. Aqua Comms owns and operates AEC-1 and AEC-2 and is part of the Amitié cable system (AEC-3). They also operate CC-1 and CC-2 between the UK and Ireland. EXA’s European footprint also includes the cables of the former Hibernia of course, and it has a presence on various other cables.

And Vantage Data Centers has lined up a new strategic partnership with Liberty Energy to help meet its growing appetite for power. Vantage and Liberty Power Innovations will partner on 1GW of power delivered to Vantage’s data center footprint over the next 5 years. That includes a reservation of 400MW of 2027 power generation capacity. The idea is to prepare for rising demand from AI and cloud sources for colo space and power on the rapidly expanding array of campuses that Vantage is investing in around the US.

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence · Datacenter · Energy · FTTH · Mergers and Acquisitions · Undersea cables