Russia mobile operator Mobile TeleSystems PJSC (MTS) (NYSE: MBT; MOEX: MTSS) has expanded its Moscow data centre footprint with the acquisition of one of Russia’s largest hosting facilities.

The deal, evaluated at RUB 5.2 bn (including net debt), saw MTS buy 100% of the share capital of GDTs Energy Group LLC, the owner of the GreenBush facility in Moscow’s Zelenograd suburb.

The GreenBush Data Center was first launched in 2018 and when fully completed is planned to have a gross capacity of 19 MW to power 2,280 racks in 24 server rooms totalling some 5,220 sqm of floor space.

A resident of a tax-privileged special economic zone (SEZ), the centre is already serving hundreds of clients following the commissioning of the first of its three planned modules, with the remaining two expected to be brought online in the near future, the company said.

Igor Egorov, VP for infrastructure development, said: “MTS has become one of the largest data centre players in Russia thanks to our balanced strategy of building out modular data centres as well as opportunistically looking at attractive assets on the market.

“When fully equipped, GreenBush will rank among the top-5 data centres in Russia by capacity, providing us significant headroom to grow in the Moscow metro area, which today accounts for some 80% of the Russian commercial data centre market.”

MTS plans to use the facility’s additional capacity to market colocation and cloud solutions to third parties as well as to help meet the company’s own compute and storage needs.

The GreenBush facility, which has received a TIER-III Detailed Design certificate from the Uptime Institute, will become the twelfth major data centre in MTS’s nationwide network, including four in Moscow, two in Nizhny Novgorod, and one each in Moscow Region, Leningrad Region, Samara, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok, and Krasnodar.