Montreal-based data center design, construction and maintenance company Urbacon Data Center Solutions has entered a partnership with Summit Industrial Income REIT. The pair will collaborate on data center projects across Canada, with Summit contributing financially.

The first such investment will be the CA$15m (US$11.96m) purchase of a 50 percent share in DC1, Urbacon’s data center in Richmond Hill, Ontario, a 10MW facility in the Barker Business Park.

Reaching for the summit

Along with the facility, Summit is taking on board half of the construction debt associated with it. The company’s website states the data center is fully leased: half of it has been earmarked for an unnamed “major cloud provider” for the next 15 years. DC1 is the first of five planned facilities, and will be developed incrementally, indexed on evolving demand.

To allow Urbacon to buy out its current partner - the Fonds immobiliers de solidarité FTQ, which holds 50 percent share in the facility - Summit will also loan CA$15.8m ($12.6m) to the company, as well as CA$14.3m ($11.4m) to fund future developments, totaling its expenditure at CA$45m (US$35.9m). 

“We are very pleased to be establishing this new relationship with Urbacon, Canada’s most experienced participant in building and operating complex data center properties. With more than twenty-five years of experience in design-built data center development and operations, to date Urbacon has built more than 2.1 million square feet of data center properties,” said Summit CEO Paul Dykeman.