MONROE, La. – CenturyLink, Inc. today announced the opening of a new data center in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The new data center is designed to serve the region’s growing demand for colocation, cloud, managed hosting and network services.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul data center, known as MP2, is built to support up to 6 megawatts of IT load and 100,000 square feet of raised floor space to meet the long-term needs of CenturyLink and its clients.

MP2 is the region’s first multitenant Tier III-constructed data center certified by the Uptime Institute, and also holds Gold certification status from the U.S. Green Building Institute’s Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design. It is located in Shakopee, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb.

MP2, which joins CenturyLink’s existing data center in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, enables businesses to deploy hybrid cloud solutions that leverage network, colocation, managed hosting and managed services.

Construction of the Minneapolis-St. Paul data center began in October 2013. The facility is one of more than 55 data centers CenturyLink operates, with more than 2.5 million square feet of gross raised floor space throughout North America, Europe and Asia. The company, ranked by Synergy Research and Frost & Sullivan as the second-largest retail colocation provider in the United States, offers robust colocation, cloud and managed services across its footprint of data centers powered by an advanced fiber network, high-availability SLAs and Uptime Institute Tier III-certified facilities.

CenturyLink Inc. (NYSE: CTL)