Lots of financial activity took place in the data center space this week. Announcements of security offerings and capital raises – sizes varying from under $100 million to well more than $0.5 billion – came from varying types of companies.

Network connectivity provider Level 3 decided to sell $640 million in securities, San Francisco-based wholesale turnkey data center provider Digital Realty Trust found a buyer for $100 million in securities and data center services provider Peak 10 expanded its credit facility to $95 million.

LEVEL 3 OFFERING

The major network service provider in the data center industry said it will use proceeds from the sale of $640 million in senior notes to repay debt that is approaching maturity. The notes were priced at about 97.1 percent of their principal amount.

Level 3 expects to complete the offering Jan. 20.

DIGITAL REALTY TRUST RAISES $100 MIL

Even during the worst periods of the recent economic downturn, DRT did not find it impossible to come by fresh expansion capital due to the size of its portfolio. The company’s CFO William Stein told DatacenterDynamics in June 2009 that DRT was looking at a healthy capital stream at a time when capital was nearly impossible to come by for smaller companies.

This week, DRT announced an agreement to sell $100 million in senior unsecured notes to Prudential Investment Management and several affiliates. Half of the amount will be issued at an annual interest rate of 4.57 percent and will mature in five years and the other half will be sold at a 5.73 percent rate and mature in seven years.

DRT is likely to use the capital to continue expansion through acquisition and build-out, as it has done aggressively. In December alone, the company invested $375 million into three properties in Connecticut and Massachusetts and bought another three properties in northern Virginia for a total of $63.3 million.

PEAK 10 CONTINUES AGGRESSIVE EXPANSION STRATEGY

The data center service provider said it would use most of its new $95 million credit facility to expand its data center footprint early in the week and on Friday announced a plan to build a new 10,000 square foot data center at its Atlanta, Ga., campus.

The deal that secured new capital for the company was lead by Canada’s RBC Capital Markets – a bank that was involved in a number of successful capital raises by data center companies to commence in the past several months.

RBC lead a group of investors in a deal that secured $150 million in new credit facility for the Texas colocation company CyrusOne. It was also involved in arranging a well-publicized $100 million debt-financing deal for data center provider Switch and Data in September.

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