In a reminder that data does in fact take up physical space, colocation provider ROOT Data Center has raised $90 million from Goldman Sachs to expand their Montreal facilities.

ROOT provides pure-play wholesale colocation solutions to a global customer base. The company currently operates two data centres in Montreal, and the new funding will help expand the current facilities as well as expand into new regional markets.

Led by President and CEO AJ Byers, ROOT secured $25 million in growth financing last year from US private equity firm ABRY Partners.

“The colocation industry in Canada has gone through a major transformation over the last two to five years,” Byers told MTLinTECH. “As more companies leverage cloud-based technologies, cloud service providers from around the world are becoming the largest consumers of colocation services.”

This consolidation is also making the average implementation 10 to 100 times larger than five years ago, resulting in the need for much larger data centers that consume much larger quantities of electricity.

“With abundant, renewable and inexpensive power, Montreal has become the most attractive data center destination in the Canadian market. In addition, as lower carbon and water usage are becoming more important for large operators such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, who have all made public their sustainability goals, ROOT with its 100 percent free air cooling and Quebec with 100 percent renewable power are a powerful combination.”

Businesses are also very concerned with matters of privacy and data residency. Having colocation operations in a region like Quebec, which is subject to Canada’s strong Personal Information Protection and Electronics Documents Act (PIEPDA) regulations helps users know their data is safe.

“International businesses are realizing that to do business in Canada with Canadians, the customer data needs to be stored in Canada. Additionally, Montreal sits in a very highly connected area with very high bandwidth networks coming from Europe and overseas, which continue onward to the rest of Canada and into the U.S. There is a very fast data connection from Montreal to major urban markets such as New York, Boston, Toronto, and Ottawa.”

Major players like Amazon, Microsft Azure, SoftLayer and Google setting up in Quebec in the past few years has created an extremely high demand for skilled employees in Montreal. These and other larch tech companies are starting to look seriously at Montreal as a place to grow their business.

“ROOT will leverage its new funding to ensure that we can meet the demands of these customers and others from across the country. Together with these companies, the data center industry has introduced hundreds, if not thousands of new jobs to the Montreal region.”