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Equinix has announced the purchase of Digital Reality’s Paris operations, including its real estate and data centre facility, for approximately $211 million (£158m).

The two companies, who continue to fight for supremacy in the colocation rankings – findings from Synergy Research in May showed Equinix as number one in colocation, with Digital Realty second and NTT third – came to a deal which included 1,000 cabinets of sold capacity in Equinix’s PA2 and PA3 data centres, as well as a further 1,000 for customer growth. Equinix has seven data centre locations in Paris alone, three of which came with the company’s acquisition of Telecity in January this year.

Equinix argues its seven Paris locations are business hubs for more than 575 companies, while its interconnection platform gives access to more than 160 network service providers and 100 cloud service providers, including Google Cloud Platform and IBM SoftLayer.

“As one of the largest economies in Europe, France continues to be a strong destination for local French businesses, as well as multinationals,” said Steve Smith, Equinix president and CEO in a statement. “We believe that by fully owning the site of our PA2 and PA3 facilities and the surrounding land, we will be able to ensure additional capacity and the ability to interconnect more networks, clouds, people and data, as customers require in the future.”

Another research study, this time from 451 Research in April, argued 2015 was a landmark year for deals in the data centre, arguing that while Digital Realty owned the most real estate, Equinix secured the most annual revenues. “Colocation is quickly becoming the nexus of both cloud and enterprise IT,” said Katie Broderick, 451 research director at the time. “The colocation market is serving as ‘data centre arms dealer’ to both enterprises and the cloud.”