A route launch, an energy milestone, and two non-core asset sales moves:
Sparkle continues to invest in its Mediterranean footprint, this week officially launching a new route between Athens and Milan. They have partnered up with Albtelecom to traverse Albania, picking up the Bari-Durres submarine cable to get back to their Italian backbone, dubbing the new lower-latency route Albania Crossing. It’s Sparkle’s sixth route between the markets of the southeastern Mediterranean basin, an area that doesn’t get much infrastructure love. Sparkle sees Athens as an ‘increasingly relevant regional cross-point’.
Vodafone says its entire European operations are now powered by electricity from non-renewable sources. That includes all their networks, data centers, retail, and offices. It’s part of a broader effort to reduce the company’s carbon footprint to ‘net zero’ by 2030. The company has been actively pursuing that goal via a number of initiatives, and I’m sure that in some cases they’ve done the usual swaps or purchased credits. But kudos to them for reaching this milestone ahead of schedule.
AT&T has sold off a non-core asset that you probably didn’t know it had. Electronic Arts will be acquiring Warner Bros. Games’ Playdemic, which came to AT&T via the AOL/Time Warner deal five years ago. Playdemic’s current main claim to fame is the mobile game Golf Clash, and will cost EA $1.4B, but they’ve been around for a bit over a decade. Playdemic’s team will probably be more at home with EA than as part of the AT&T world.
And Iron Mountain has done a sale/leaseback deal over in the UK. The data center and storage specialist has sold 5 facilities spanning 550,000 square feet in the London metro area to Intermediate Capital Group for $178M. Iron Mountain plan to recycle that capital back into other parts of their business, and will remain a tenant in the facilities with a 12 year lease with a 20 year renewal option.
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Categories: Datacenter · Energy · Internet Backbones · Mergers and Acquisitions · Undersea cables
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I don’t think AOL was a part of the Time Warner acquisition. I think Verizon already owned AOL.