US data center and services company Involta has agreed to be bought by the finance giant Carlyle Group.

Involta has 12 data centers and concentrates on hybrid IT, hybrid cloud, and colocation. It also has 12,000 miles of its own fiber network in the US. It is currently owned by M/C Partners; the transaction is expected to close in early 2022.

Carlyle says it will use its capital and resources to expand Involta and help it reach new customers. Involta is predominantly based in the Midwest, Pacific Northwest, and Southwestern US, helping grow its capabilities for both new and existing customers.

"Involta has built a world-class platform with a demonstrated operating model for delivering high-quality service to customers in an increasingly complex, hybrid cloud-based world," said Joshua Pang, head of digital infrastructure for Carlyle's Infrastructure Group. "We see significant opportunity for growth given the long-term secular demand drivers of data proliferation, digital connectivity, and the digitization of enterprise and institutional operating models."

Bruce Lehrman, founder and CEO of Involta, said, "We are thrilled to work with Carlyle's proven investment team. We see many logical opportunities to continue expanding Involta's footprint and infrastructure, and look forward to leveraging Carlyle's global resources and deep expertise to further accelerate our growth momentum."

Carlyle is managing some $293 billion in assets, with $5 billion of that in infrastructure. It has previously had a significant hands-on involvement in data center firms, setting up CoreSite in 2001, an operator which recently sold to American Tower for more than $10 billion.

It bought 25 percent of Indian telco Bharti Airtel's data center division Nxtra Data in 2020, but has so far had little or no involvement in the current surge of data center M&A activity, though it regularly features in lists of potential suitors for any data center firm believed to be up for sale.