Verizon Communications has reportedly launched an auction to divest its data centres as the company looks to focus on its core business.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the Reuters excluisve reported that Verizon’s 48-data centre colocation portfolio generates about $275m a year in earnings.
The company is planning to yield over $2.5bn from sale of the assets, which include the data centre portfolio it secured via its $1.4bn purchase of Terremark Worldwide in 2011.
Verizon failed to reach a deal with a buyer when its first explored a sale of a larger part of its enterprise business that also includes the former MCI assets.
The company negotiated with CenturyLink in 2015 for its enterprise business.
Apart from Verizon, other US firms such as AT&T and CenturyLink are also evaluating strategic alternatives for their data centre assets.
Last year, Windstream divested its data centre business to TierPoint for $575m.
Verizon held discussions in 2015 to raise approximately $10bn through the sale of its assets to meet debt commitments.
The potential offloads are being seen as a response to the rise of the web scale cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, Google for Work and AWS.
