Altice subsidiary PT Portugal is investing €4m ($4.9m) in the expansion of its data center in Covilha, a city in the center of Portugal. 

The expansion will allow it to migrate the infrastructure for Sapo, its ISP and search engine, which currently comprises 671 servers and a petabyte’s worth of storage.

Covf…vilha

PT Portugal’s parent company, Altice, offers telecommunications, media, advertising and entertainment services, and is also the parent of French mobile network SFR, making it the second largest telecoms company in France.

Last year, it sold both of its Swiss data center businesses - Green.ch and Green Datacenter - to InfraVia for $217m, as it struggled to deal with $59.6bn of debt recorded in the third quarter of 2017.

The deals were announced following a period of upheaval in the upper echelons of both its own and its subsidiaries’ executive teams: the company replaced the PT Telecom CEO twice in the space of six months, and Altice CEO Michel Combes resigned in November.

PT Portugal was recently valued at €7bn, according to Le Monde, which reported that French multinational telecommunications firm Orange would consider buying the Portuguese company should it be put on sale.

This appears unlikely - last year, Altice’s founder and controlling shareholder Patrick Drahi chose to spin-off its American operations into a separate business, dissociating Altice Europe and Altice USA so as to keep non-European part of the company safe from the turmoil taking place in Europe at the time.