Following its announcement this week of plans to buy Level 3 Communications, CenturyLink said Friday it will sell its data center and colocation business to a group of investors for $2.15 billion in cash. CenturyLink will also get a minority stake valued at $150 million in the consortium's global secure infrastructure company.

CenturyLink Inc. (NYSE: CTL) is selling off its portfolio of 57 data centers to the consortium, comprising funds advised by BC Partners , Medina Capital Advisors and Longview Asset Management, the telecom company said in statement Friday. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2017.

CenturyLink will use the money to partly fund its $24 billion acquisition of Level 3 Communications Inc. (NYSE: LVLT), announced Monday. (See CenturyLink Splashes $34B on Level 3 Buy.)

The data centers will become part of a joint venture between BC Partners and Medina Capital, expected to launch in the first quarter of 2017, focusing on cybersecurity, data analytics and IT infrastructure, the two companies said in a statement. Other services in the joint venture include Cryptzone, for perimeter security; Catbird, for segmentation, visualization and security policy enforcement across cloud infrastructure; Easy Solutions for fraud detection; and Brainspace for machine learning, data discovery and analytics, and insider threat detection.

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The new joint venture will have more than 3,500 customers and 2.6 million square feet of raised floor capacity, the partners said.

Manuel Medina, founder and managing partner of Medina Capital, will be CEO of the new company, joined by the executive team from Medina Capital, including the former senior leadership of Terremark, a data center, cybersecurity and infrastructure services company acquired by Verizon in 2011 in a $2 billion transaction, the partners said. (See Verizon Taps Terremark for $1.4B.

Early last month, Verizon was reportedly in a deal to sell its data center assets to Equinix for about $3.5 billion, but nothing has been confirmed yet. (See Verizon Nearing $3.5B Data Center Sale to Equinix – Report.)

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— Mitch Wagner, , Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud