Gary Wojtaszek, president and CEO of CyrusOne (NASDAQ: CONE), participated in a video interview at Nareit’s REITweek: 2018 Investor Conference in New York.
Wojtaszek said that the growth that CyrusOne has seen in the United States during the last few years is now beginning to land on European shores.
“We’re trying to build that European platform,” he said. “Our first move was the acquisition of Zenium.”
Wojtaszek said Zenium gives the company a presence in London and Frankfurt, the two largest data center markets in Europe. He said the company also has organic initiatives underway in Dublin and Amsterdam. “So, by the end of this year, we’re going to be a pretty substantial presence in Europe,” he said.
Beyond Europe, Wojtaszek noted that China is also on the company’s radar. Last October, CyrusOne made an investment in GDS, the largest data center operator in China.
Because GDS has a dominant position selling to all the cloud companies in China, Wojtaszek said the company made a $100 million investment that is now worth approximately $320 million. “But the really big reason for partnering up with them is for the commercial relationship that we’re establishing,” he said, adding that the company is working on a number of cross-border deals with Chinese data centers.
Wojtaszek said that the biggest cloud companies in the world now need gigawatts of capacity and that it concerns him from a financial perspective. “That’s close to $15 billion of capital required to build out all of that capacity,” he said. “I’m concerned that we need to staff up appropriately to meet all that demand [but] it’s a good problem to have.”
Wojtaszek said that the cloud companies have been the biggest growth driver for his business. “Four years ago…traditional brick-and-mortar, Fortune 1000 customers were our bread and butter, [but now cloud companies are] a little over 30 percent of our business,” he said, adding that he expects eventually that will grow to 75 percent of the company’s business.
“The cloud is in the early stages. It’s an $80 billion business out of a trillion-dollar annual spend. So, there’s a lot of room for growth,” he said.