California-based Digital Realty, a global provider of data centre, colocation and interconnection solutions, has opened its third data centre in Toronto, Canada. The new YYZ12 facility spans 640 square metres and offers 800 kilowatts of customer capacity. The company chose Toronto due to the growing importance of the region as one of the next major technology hubs in North America. The city is also a major hub for the financial services, banking and insurance industries.

In addition, the company broke ground on its fourth data centre in Marseille, France. The new MRS4 site will offer up to 13.6 megawatts of customer capacity and approximately 6,700 square metres of total equipped space. Built on the Marseille Fos port, it will benefit from direct access to the submarine cable systems connected to Marseille. These capabilities make Marseille a gateway for telecommunications, cloud and digital access between Europe and other continents. The continued development of the Marseille Campus also represents a strategic expansion of PlatformDigital, Digital Realty’s global data centre platform for scaling digital business.

In a press release, chief executive officer A William Stein stated: “Together these new capabilities in Toronto and Marseille represent a strategic milestone on Digital Realty’s global roadmap for PlatformDigital in North America and the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. Over the past 18 months since we announced our platform vision and strategy, we’ve introduced more than 20 new data centre expansion projects around the globe. As enterprises across all industries rapidly shifted to digital business models during an unprecedented year, the global number of participants in our connected data communities more than doubled to over 4,000 organisations.”