Cologix Inc. has acquired a 68,000 square feet data centre facility in Vancouver in an investment designed to make western Canada a hotspot for cloud deployments.

The 4MW building dubbed VAN4 located at 175 West Cordova in the Gastown District will connect to Cologix’s three other sites in the Canadian city through a dark fibre system.

This will link the centre to over 200 carriers including Bell Canada, Rogers, Shaw, Telus and Zayo; cloud onramps from Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute and Amazon Web Services Direct Connect; and the Cologix Access Marketplace.

Cologix’s CEO Bill Fathers, said: “175 West Cordova is already the most strategically connected building in Vancouver, home to several international and trans-Canadian long-haul networks with strong pre-leasing activity for additional transpacific carriers and new hyperscale edge deployments.”

As the vast majority of North American terrestrial fibre networks connect through western Canada into Vancouver, the City of Vancouver is rapidly becoming a leading data networking and cloud services hub, on the level of such connection-dense West Coast cities as San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.

Laura Ortman, Cologix’s President and Chief Revenue Officer, added: “Vancouver is a fast-growing and digitally progressive market; digital media, financial services and technology companies are embracing the cloud as part of their digital transformation.

“VAN4 is a new international gateway that will connect Vancouver based companies to their clients and suppliers across the Asia-Pacific region.”

In 2020 Cologix tripled capacity in Vancouver with VAN3, a 5 MW, 42,000 square foot facility located at 2828 Natal Street.

Cologix has invested CAD $500+ million (US$401 million) over three years to grow its Canadian platform, including building and expanding cloud gateways with directly adjacent or annex peering hubs and hyperscale edge facilities, enabling dark fibre connectivity, and developing 13 cloud onramps to access hyperscale cloud providers directly and privately.

The company’s interconnection footprint in Canada includes today 20 data centres in Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, Ashburn, Columbus, Dallas, Jacksonville, Lakeland, Minneapolis, New Jersey and Silicon Valley.