Data center and cloud service provider QTS has bought a data center facility in New Jersey from McGraw Hill Financial for US$75m as part of its growth-by-acquisition strategy.

QTS has also announced a new partnership with service provider Atos.

The 194ac facility creates 560,000 sq ft of space, with 58,000 sq ft of raised floor and consuming 12MW of power.

It has the potential to double its capacity through expansion, with the addition of another 100,000 sq ft of raised floor and up to 20MW of gross power, when needed.

Further power (and carbon reduction capacity) could be met with a 50ac, 14.1 MW solar field, which it claims is one of the biggest privately-owned, net-metered solar projects in the western hemisphere.

QTS said the field could help clients cut their carbon reduction by close to 14,000 tons of CO².

The logic of the deal, according to QTS, is that many enterprise customers similar to McGraw Hill Financial want to outsource their data center function, but the experience in integrating technology is scarce.

As part of the deal in buying the data center, QTS has signed a 10 year lease, plus a 15 year extension option, with France-based global systems integrator Atos.

QTS will provide Atos with its custom data center (C1) offering and its new QTS Critical Facilities Management (CFM) service.

Atos will use QTS' expertise in data center management and services to run data center facilities for its own enterprise customers.

Under the terms of the partnership, Atos will rebadge the data center operator’s C1 and CFM services and bundle it with its own IT outsourcing service for McGraw Hill Financial, which will keep the New Jersey facility as its data center base.

QTS's CEO Chad Williams said the Atos-QTS partnership could be typical of the way data center operators and systems integrators will work in the future.

"With a global client base and more than 76,000 employees in 52 countries, Atos clearly is a strong international business technology company for QTS to enter a relationship with," Williams said.

“We focus on infrastructure.”