CenturyLink Continues Expanding Data Centers it May Sell

As it looks for alternatives to owning its data centers, CenturyLink continues expanding them. The company added 14MW of capacity across eight sites last year, and plans to expand four more in the first half of 2016, according to an announcement released on Monday.

When CenturyLink execs announced they were looking for ways to off-load some or all of the company’s data centers last year, they said CenturyLink would continue providing data center services. You don’t have to own facilities to do that, and many companies provide a variety of services out of data centers they lease.

But data center providers have to continuously expand their capacity for a number of reasons. Existing customers often need to expand their infrastructure within the buildings they’re already in, and it’s important to have spare capacity to capture new demand.

Besides colocation, CenturyLink provides a variety of managed hosting, cloud, network, and IT services, and they require a lot of physical data center capacity too. The company is going after hybrid deployments, where customers use both their own infrastructure in colocation space and services up the stack.

Read more: Why CenturyLink Doesn’t Want to Own Data Centers

Over the last five years, CenturyLink added 11 data centers to its footprint and expanded about 40 existing sites. Its total current data center footprint is about 2.6 million square feet across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

CenturyLink is not the only telco giant that may sell a lot of data center capacity in the near future. Verizon is exploring alternatives to data center ownership, and so is AT&T.

Top management of the data center provider Equinix indicated on the company’s latest earnings call that it was in talks with both CenturyLink and Verizon about potentially buying their data center assets.