Equinix has completed its acquisition of the India operations of GPX Global Systems for USD 161 million in cash, giving the American interconnection company two data centres in Mumbai and a foothold in a market it had been watching for years. The two facilities, named MB1 and MB2, sit on a single fibre-connected campus.

The company says the campus serves more than 350 international and local companies, including all local carriers, 170 internet service providers and five internet exchanges, and that the pair provide an initial 1,350 cabinets with a further 500 to be built out, adding more than 90,000 square feet of colocation space when fully developed.

What the price buys

Equinix is buying density rather than land. A campus already wired to five internet exchanges and to the direct-connect nodes of AWS, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud is worth more than the same racks in an empty building, and it shortens the time before the site can carry traffic. That is the usual argument for acquisition over greenfield construction, and it is why the price per cabinet matters more than the headline. The interconnection business is a contest for the same tenants, and Mumbai now has several operators claiming the same handful of cloud providers.

The company has appointed Manoj Paul, previously of GPX India, as managing director for India, and points to the country's coming 5G rollout as the demand driver. Those are the company's own numbers and its own forecast. A completed acquisition is the verifiable part, and the integration that follows is where the cost of a deal like this usually lands. Whether a global operator can run a Mumbai campus more cheaply than the local team it has just bought is the question the release does not answer.