TOKYO — NTT Communications Corp. (NTT Com), e-shelter, an operator of data center services in Germany, and ABRY Partners, a private equity investment firm, jointly announced that NTT Com will acquire 86.7% of e-shelter’s issued shares. The acquisition will vault the NTT Com group into the no. 3 position for data center space in Europe.

e-shelter is currently managing nearly 90,000 square meters of data center space in four major cities in Germany, as well as Zurich, Switzerland and Vienna, Austria. One of its main facilities, Campus Frankfurt 1, Europe’s largest data center with some 60,000 square meters of data center space, comprises five free-standing buildings constructed specifically as data centers.

The acquisition will further strengthen NTT Com’s EU capabilities to meet increased demand for data center and cloud services, as well as provide increasingly efficient services to migrate customer systems to the cloud. The EU data center market is growing at 9% per year, according to the research firm Gartner, Inc.

NTT Com currently operates data centers in the UK, France, Germany and Spain which e-shelter’s six locations in central Europe will complement perfectly.

NTT Communications Corp. (NYSE: NTT)