OVH raises €400 million to accelerate global data centre growth

OVH has signaled its intentions for the future with a huge funding round to support its strategic developments.

The global cloud player announced the closing of a €400 milion funding round with a pool of nine banking institutions.

According to the company, this operation will strengthen its financing structure to support its global expansion strategy over the next 5 years.

Today, OVH has 270,000 servers deployed within 20 data centers across five countries in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Its services are delivered to more than a million customers around the world and coincidentally, generated revenues close to €400 million in 2016/2017.

Chief financial officer of the OVH group, Nicolas Boyer says the new financing provides the company with an increasingly robust banking pool that has renewed its confidence in the group's international strategy and positioning.

"In addition, the entry of US investment bank JP Morgan into this pool reflects our position as a global player in cloud computing," says Boyer.

"We will continue to implement our strategic plan through international deployment, consolidation of our position in the digital market, acceleration of our growth among enterprise customers and by reinforcement and structuring of our organisation to take full advantage of market opportunities.

According to OVH, the company intends to use this new investment to follow its global expansion strategy that began in autumn 2016 with the entry of KKR and Towerbrook to its capital with a €250 million investment after the company announced an ambitious development and investment plan worth €2 billion.

The execution of OVH's global expansion plan has in fact commenced, most notably with the opening of data centers in new geographical zones - a total of three data centers are now located in Australia, Singapore and Poland, with a fourth and a fifth under construction in Germany and the United Kingdom.

In the United States, where OVH launched a new company in 2017, two additional data centers will also be available soon.

Société Générale Corporate - Investment Banking has accompanied OVH since 2014 and acted as Coordinator and Documentation Agent.

The Mandated Lead Arrangers and Bookrunners of the syndicated loan were BNP Paribas, Groupe Crédit Agricole, HSBC France and Société Générale Corporate - Investment Banking. The participants were JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. (Paris Branch), CIC Nord Ouest and Banque Commerciale du Marché Nord Europe.