Data center operator Equinix Inc. today said that it has inked a $750 million deal to acquire 13 data center sites from BCE Inc., better known as Bell Canada, Canada’s largest telecommunications company.

The transaction is expected to close by year’s end. The 13 data center sites that will join Equinix’s portfolio are home to 25 individual facilities, all in Canada, and will give the company a presence on both coasts of the third largest economy in the Americas. It’s also gaining more than 500 new customers through the deal. 

Redwood City, California-based Equinix is already the world’s largest data center and colocation provider with a network of 210-plus facilities. The company’s main business is hosting other organizations’ technology infrastructure. Equinix’s customers include, among others, the major public cloud operators, which were apparently a big part of the reason it chose to grow its Canadian presence.

Equinix has “vibrant, dense ecosystems of global cloud service providers (CSPs), including the world’s biggest hyperscalers (you know who they are), as well as technology partners and global network service providers (NSPs),” Jon Lin, the head of Equinix’s Americas business, wrote in a blog post today. “The Bell acquisition will enable our partners to make their services available to the Canadian market on Platform Equinix.”

The company allows public cloud providers and other partners to link their infrastructure to its data center network. Enterprises that also use its data centers can then directly connect their Equinix-hosted servers to those cloud providers’ Equinix-connected infrastructure using an interconnect product called ECX Fabric. This  direct connection bypasses the internet, which Equinix says facilitates more reliable and faster data transfer.

In an interview last year on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE studio, Equinix Chief Executive Charles Meyers pointed to the company’s networking capabilities as its top differentiator. “Candidly, people can buy credible data center capacity from a number of players. But [what] they really want is not so much a data center as they want to connect to somebody specifically,” Meyers said. “It’s that interconnection piece that really differentiates Equinix from the rest.” 

One of the company’s first orders of business when the deal closes will be hooking up the Canadian data center sites to the ECX Fabric interconnect. The company has also partnered with seller Bell Canada’s Bell Business Markets unit to offer customers professional services, broadband networking options and a “wide range of cloud solutions.”

The 13 sites are spread across seven metropolitan areas: Calgary, Kamloops, Vancouver, Millidgeville in the city of Saint John, Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg. The sites in Vancouver and Millidgeville are particularly notable pickups. They open “gateways for North America to Asia through Vancouver and North America to Europe through the submarine cable systems in the Millidgeville area,” Lin explained.

The company said it expects the data center sites to generate about $105 million in revenue this fiscal year. The $750 million it’s paying values the sites at about 15 times their earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. 

Photo of Equinix’s Toronto data center: Equinix