Hurricane Electric, Silicon Valley-based provider of colocation services and operator of a global IPv6-native Internet backbone, has secured US$13m from Bank of the West to finance expansion of its data center in Fremont, California.

Hurricane Electric president Mike Leber indicated the expansion project was a response in growth in demand for colocation services.

“With yet another expansion of our Fremont 2 facility, Hurricane Electric will be able to offer prime wholesale colocation to new customers seeking the high level of service current customers have come to expect,” he said.

Colocation-wise, Hurricane Electric has been purely a Silicon Valley player, operating two data centers in Fremont and one in San Jose. Its IPv6 network, however, is reportedly the largest in the world, and the company has been one of the loudest voices in the push for transition to the new Internet Protocol device addressing system.

The amount of remaining IPv4 addresses is quickly running down. The final blocks of IPv4 addresses available in Europe started to be given out last week.

Ripe NCC, an address allocation body in Europe and Middle East, said it was distributing addresses from the last 16.8m batch of IPv4 addresses.